Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

David Paul Morris / Stringer / Getty Images

  • Computers & The Internet
  • Famous Inventions
  • Famous Inventors
  • Patents & Trademarks
  • Invention Timelines
  • American History
  • African American History
  • African History
  • Ancient History and Culture
  • Asian History
  • European History
  • Latin American History
  • Medieval & Renaissance History
  • Military History
  • The 20th Century
  • Women's History
  • Out of Mom and Pop's Garage

Apple Corporation

Disney pixar, expanding apple.

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955–October 5, 2011) is best remembered as the co-founder of Apple Computers . He teamed up with inventor  Steve Wozniak to create one of the first ready-made PCs. Besides his legacy with Apple, Jobs was also a smart businessman who became a multimillionaire before the age of 30. In 1984, he founded NeXT computers. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. and started Pixar Animation Studios.

Fast Facts: Steve Jobs

  • Known For : Co-founding Apple Computer Company and playing a pioneering role in the development of personal computing
  • Also Known As : Steven Paul Jobs
  • Born : February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California
  • Parents : Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble (biological parents); Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian (adoptive parents)
  • Died : October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California
  • Education : Reed College
  • Awards and Honors : National Medal of Technology (with Steve Wozniak), Jefferson Award for Public Service, named the most powerful person in business by Fortune  magazine, Inducted into the California Hall of Fame, inducted as a Disney Legend
  • Spouse : Laurene Powell
  • Children : Lisa (by Chrisann Brennan), Reed, Erin, Eve
  • Notable Quote : "Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form."

Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. The biological child of Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, he was later adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian. During his high school years, Jobs worked summers at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he first met and became partners with Steve Wozniak.

As an undergraduate, he studied physics, literature, and poetry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Formally, he only attended one semester there. However, he remained at Reed and crashed on friends' sofas and audited courses that included a calligraphy class, which he attributes as being the reason Apple computers had such elegant typefaces.

After leaving Oregon in 1974 to return to California, Jobs started working for Atari , an early pioneer in the manufacturing of personal computers. Jobs' close friend Wozniak was also working for Atari. The future founders of Apple teamed up to design games for Atari computers.

Jobs and Wozniak proved their skills as hackers by designing a telephone blue box. A blue box was an electronic device that simulated a telephone operator's dialing console and provided the user with free phone calls. Jobs spent plenty of time at Wozniak's Homebrew Computer Club, a haven for computer geeks and a source of invaluable information about the field of personal computers.

Out of Mom and Pop's Garage

By the late 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak had learned enough to try their hand at building personal computers. Using Jobs' family garage as a base of operation, the team produced 50 fully assembled computers that were sold to a local Mountain View electronics store called the Byte Shop. The sale encouraged the pair to start Apple Computer, Inc. on April 1, 1979.

The Apple Corporation was named after Jobs' favorite fruit. The Apple logo was a representation of the fruit with a bite taken out of it. The bite represented a play on words: bite and byte.

Jobs co-invented the  Apple I  and Apple II computers together with Wozniak, who was the main designer, and others. The Apple II is considered to be one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers. In 1984, Wozniak, Jobs, and others co-invented the  Apple Macintosh  computer, the first successful home computer with a mouse-driven graphical user interface. It was, however, based on (or, according to some sources, stolen from) the Xerox Alto, a concept machine built at the Xerox PARC research facility. According to the Computer History Museum, the Alto included:

A mouse. Removable data storage. Networking. A visual user interface. Easy-to-use graphics software. “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) printing, with printed documents matching what users saw on screen. E-mail. Alto for the first time combined these and other now-familiar elements in one small computer.

During the early 1980s, Jobs controlled the business side of the Apple Corporation. Steve Wozniak was in charge of the design side. However, a power struggle with the board of directors led to Jobs leaving Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, a high-end computer company. Ironically, Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and Jobs returned to his old company to serve once more as its CEO from 1997 until his retirement in 2011.

The NeXT was an impressive workstation computer that sold poorly. The world's first web browser was created on a NeXT, and the technology in NeXT software was transferred to the Macintosh and the iPhone .

In 1986, Jobs bought "The Graphics Group" from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for $10 million. The company was later renamed Pixar. At first, Jobs intended for Pixar to become a high-end graphics hardware developer, but that goal was never met. Pixar moved on to do what it now does best, which is make animated films. Jobs negotiated a deal to allow Pixar and Disney to collaborate on a number of animated projects that included the film "Toy Story." In 2006, Disney bought Pixar from Jobs.

After Jobs returned to Apple as its CEO in 1997, Apple Computers had a renaissance in product development with the iMac, iPod , iPhone, iPad, and more.

Before his death, Jobs was listed as the inventor and/or co-inventor on 342 United States patents, with technologies ranging from computer and portable devices to user interfaces, speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards, and packages. His last patent was issued for the Mac OS X Dock user interface and was granted the day before his death.

Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. He had been ill for a long time with pancreatic cancer, which he had treated using alternative techniques. His family reported that his final words were, "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

Steve Jobs was a true computer pioneer and entrepreneur whose impact is felt in almost every aspect of contemporary business, communication, and design. Jobs was absolutely dedicated to every detail of his products—according to some sources, he was obsessive—but the outcome can be seen in the sleek, user-friendly, future-facing designs of Apple products from the very start. It was Apple that placed the PC on every desk, provided digital tools for design and creativity, and pushed forward the ubiquitous smartphone which has, arguably, changed the ways in which humans think, create, and interact.

  • Computer History Museum. " What Was The First PC? "
  • Gladwell, Malcolm, and Malcolm Gladwell. “ The Real Genius of Steve Jobs .”  The New Yorker , 19 June 2017.
  • Levy, Steven. “ Steve Jobs .”  Encyclopædia Britannica , 20 Feb. 2019.
  • A History of Apple Computers
  • Biography of Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer Co-Founder
  • History's 15 Most Popular Inventors
  • The First Historical Hobby and Home Computers
  • Who Actually Invented the Macintosh Computer?
  • History of Computer Printers
  • The Brief History of Smartphones
  • 29 Motivational Quotes to Get Yourself Charged
  • Biography of Bill Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft
  • Biography of Hannah Höch, Co-Founder of Berlin Dada
  • The Unusual History of Microsoft Windows
  • History of the Atari Video System
  • Famous Inventions and Birthdays in February
  • Who Invented the Computer Mouse?
  • The History of Laptop Computers
  • Starting a Business
  • Growing a Business
  • Business News
  • Science & Technology
  • Money & Finance
  • Subscribers For Subscribers
  • ELN Write for Entrepreneur
  • Store Entrepreneur Store
  • Spotlight Spotlight
  • United States
  • Asia Pacific
  • Middle East
  • South Africa

Copyright © 2024 Entrepreneur Media, LLC All rights reserved. Entrepreneur® and its related marks are registered trademarks of Entrepreneur Media LLC

Apple's Steve Jobs: An Extraordinary Career Ever wondered how Steve Jobs was so successful? Discover the answers in this comprehensive overview of his life, career and death.

By Entrepreneur Staff

Few entrepreneurs have been as impactful as Steve Jobs : the father of Apple computers and one of the most influential business people ever, not only in America but worldwide.

Throughout his career, Steve Jobs started multiple businesses that pushed forward the computer revolution and reshaped how society interfaces with technology.

But how did he attain his titanic success, and what led to his eventual downfall and re-ascension to Apple leadership? These questions have important answers, so keep reading for a closer look at Steve Jobs and his life.

Related: Top 10 Hiring Platforms for Small Business

An overview of Steve Jobs' life

Steven Paul Jobs was an American business owner, entrepreneur, investor and media proprietor. He was best known for co-founding and leading Apple, one of the most successful companies ever. But he also started and ran many successful companies, such as Pixar and NeXT.

Related: Pixar - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

Jobs led Apple for many years before he was forced out because of a dispute with the company's Board of Directors. After founding Pixar and NeXT Inc., another computer platform development company, he returned to steer the Apple ship when the company found itself in trying economic times.

Eventually, a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor led Jobs to reduce his working hours and responsibilities. He died at the age of 56 from respiratory arrest.

Though he died before reaching late age, he left a legacy of entrepreneurial ambition and business savvy that cannot be forgotten.

Related: These 5 Steve Jobs Keynotes Will Inspire You to Better Sell Your Ideas

What is the history of Steve Jobs and Apple ?

The history of Steve Jobs is intricately intertwined with the history of Apple.

It all began in Jobs' youth when he called the co-founder and president of Hewlett-Packard, William Hewlett, for parts for a high school project. Hewlett did more than that.

Related: Hewlett-Packard - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

He was so impressed that he offered the young Steve Jobs a summer internship working at Hewlett-Packard.

who's steve jobs biography

This turned out to be a destiny-shaping internship, where Jobs met Steve Wozniak: the future primary creator of the Apple Computer. Wozniak was a talented engineer at the time and five years older than Jobs.

Related: Steve Wozniak - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

Jobs finished his internship and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. However, he decided to drop out after just one semester, eventually working for Atari designing video games to save enough money to take an Eastern spiritual trip.

When did Apple start?

After he returned from his trip, Jobs reconnected with Wozniak and discovered that his friend was trying to build a personal computer. Wozniak saw the entire endeavor as nothing more than a hobby, but Jobs saw the business potential in a personal computer anyone could have in their home.

Jobs convinced Wozniak to go into business with him. At 20 years old, he set up the Apple company in 1975, working primarily out of his parent's garage in San Francisco, California.

The Apple I computer was released shortly after that, while the pair attended meetings of the local Homebrew Computer Club. To make the project work, Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus to generate nearly $1400 in liquid capital.

The Apple I was a modest success and was primarily sold to other hobbyists like Wozniak. But it made the business duo enough money to expand their venture.

who's steve jobs biography

By 1977, they had completed a new product, the Apple II , the first personal computer to include a keyboard and color graphics. Its user-friendliness and innovative features made it an instant market success; in the first year, Apple made $3 million. In another two years, it had made over $200 million.

This was the first timeApple saw significant success. Unfortunately, 1980 saw increased competition caused by companies like IBM, partially due to the lackluster Apple III and LISA follow-up computers. Determined to make his mark on the business world, Jobs helped to create the AppleMacintosh in 1984.

The defining factor? A graphical user interface or GUI which a mouse could control. This revolution changed personal computing for everyone, allowing anyone without programming knowledge to now use a computer.

Why did Steve Jobs have a falling out with Apple ?

While the AppleMacintosh was a major technical success, it was priced too high for the consumer market at about $2,495. Furthermore, it wouldn't work for corporate buyers, as it lacked certain features businesses needed (such as high memory, hard drive and networking capabilities).

Though Jobs had helped to usher in a new industry entirely, his aggressive and sometimes egocentric personality led him to clash with Apple's Board of Directors.

By 1983, he had worn out his welcome. He was removed from the board by then-CEO John Sculley. Ironically, Jobs had picked Sculley personally to lead Apple.

who's steve jobs biography

What were Jobs' new endeavors?

Jobs sold his shares of Apple stock and fully resigned in 1985, moving on to build NeXT Computer Co. This new computer company would create another computer to revolutionize higher education.

It was introduced in 1988 , offering innovations like good graphics, a digital signal processor chip and an optical disk drive. However, it was still too expensive to attract big buyers, so Jobs pivoted once again.

This time, he took an interest in PixarAnimation Studios, which he had purchased in 1986 from George Lucas. He cut a deal with the Walt Disney Company to create entirely computer-generated feature films, the first and most popular of which was Toy Story : a 1995 smash hit that broke box office records.

Emboldened by this success, Jobs took the Pixar company public in 1996 and, overnight, was a billionaire thanks to his 80% share of the company. Jobs was finally rich, but this was just the beginning of his rise back to fame and power.

When did Jobs return to Apple ?

Apple Inc. then bought NeXT for approximately $400 million. More importantly, the company reappointed Jobs to the Board of Directors as an advisor to the then chairman and CEO Gilbert F. Amelio.

This was partially out of desperation and nostalgia, as Apple had not developed a popular Macintoshoperating system for the next generation. As a result, Apple's control of the PC market had dropped precipitously, reaching an all-time low of just 5.3%.

Jobs took the reins once again in March 1997, when Apple announced a $708 million quarterly loss. Jobs took over as the interim Apple CEO when Amelio resigned. To ensure the survival of the company he helped to found, Jobs made a deal with Microsoft, getting some investment capital from the competing company in exchange for a nonvoting minority stake.

Jobs' guidance gradually yielded essential benefits for Apple. He led the "Think Different" advertising campaign and the charge to install a new G3 PowerPC microprocessor in Apple computers, making them faster than competing devices.

Then he led the company to develop the iMac as a new, affordable type of home desktop, which finally resulted in the positive reviews he craved. By the end of 1988, Apple had made nearly $6 billion in sales.

However, the innovative iPhone was the most significant victory under Jobs' belt. Once shortly after the iPod portable audio player launched in 2001 alongside iTunes, the iPhone handset came about in 2007, revolutionizing mobile phones and mobile devices.

who's steve jobs biography

The iPhone was the first handheld phone to make calls, text and access the Internet from an intuitive and user-friendly touchscreen. These days, all modern mobile phones are based on the original iPhone design.

Related: Why Steve Jobs 's Passion for Calligraphy is an Important Example for You

Who created Apple ?

Apple was created by both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Throughout the partnership, Wozniak was the technical and engineering brains of the operation, spearheading many of the hardware and software development needed to launch the original Apple line of computers. J obs handled the business side of things.

Unfortunately, Wozniak and Jobs had many significant disagreements about the design and development of Apple technologies. Things came to a head with the development of the Apple II, and Wozniak ultimately left the company in 1983.

How did Apple get its name?

Supposedly, there's no profound story surrounding Apple and its name — Steve Jobs just liked apples . A potentially apocryphal story says that Steve Jobs suggested the Apple name to Steve Wozniak after the former visited an apple orchard when they were beginning their business.

Ultimately, the name's origin doesn't matter; it's iconic and unique enough compared to other computer firms that it has cemented itself in business history.

What did Steve Jobs invent?

Although Steve Jobs is named an author of 346 patents according to the US registry, he didn't technically invent anything. He didn't invent the Apple I, the Macintosh computer, the universal remote, the iPod, the iPad or the iPhone.

While he understood the design principles and engineering knowledge behind many of these inventions, his primary skill was business acumen.

Jobs may not have invented these revolutionary technologies, but he did inspire those with the skills to create them. More importantly, he knew how to market and sell those inventions, especially on stage. The Macbook Air, Mac computers and other Apple products would not have been as successful without him.

Related: How Steve Jobs Saved Apple

What was Steve Jobs ' net worth?

Before his death, Steve Jobs' net worth was approximately $10.2 billion , most of which was tied up in his stock options and similar assets. However, he acquired a very high net worth by age 25, at which point it was $250 million, roughly equivalent to around $745 million in 2021.

What were Steve Jobs ' major investments?

Throughout his career, Steve Jobs merely invested in companies that he owned, such as Apple, Pixar and NeXT. This is why his wealth ballooned so much after major business breakthroughs. Jobs was also known to hold stock and assets in companies like Microsoft and other tech companies.

What was Steve Jobs ' education like?

Like many famous entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs did not have a very comprehensive traditional education. Though he graduated high school and enrolled at Reed College in Oregon, he did not stay there for long.

He dropped out of just one semester without telling his parents. This turned out to be the right choice for his long-term career, as Jobs had the time to focus on Apple and his other endeavors.

Related: Steve Jobs Systematically Cultivated His Creativity. You Can Too

Who is in Steve Jobs ' family?

Steve Jobs was born to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, German-American and Syrian, respectively.

However, Jobs was adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian, who had elected to consider adoption after an ectopic pregnancy in 1955. Jobs reportedly loved his parents and treated them as his "true" family from an early age.

Jobs had one adopted sister, Patricia, who was adopted in 1957. He met his future wife, Laurene Powell, at Stanford Graduate School of Business. They were married in 1991 at Yosemite National Park and had their first child that same year.

Reed, the first child, eventually graduated from Stanford University. The couple's next to children, Erin Siena and Eve, were born in 1995 and 1988, respectively.

However, Jobs had another child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, in 1978, from an on-again-off-again relationship with Chrisann Brennan. Jobs initially denied responsibility for the child but eventually was required to make child-support payments and provide medical insurance coverage for Lisa after a DNA test that proved his fraternity in 1980.

Related: The Best Advice Steve Jobs Ever Gave

What donations, charity and philanthropic efforts did Steve Jobs pursue?

Unlike many wealthy individuals, Steve Jobs was not well known for his philanthropic or charitable donations. He was a very private individual and was repeatedly criticized during his business career for not donating as much money as fellow billionaires.

That said, while his name may be absent from the Million Dollar List of large global philanthropy, many have speculated that large anonymous donations may have been made by Jobs at one time or another.

Jobs did launch the Stephen P. Jobs Foundation after leaving Apple. The Foundation was originally intended to focus on vegetarianism and nutrition but eventually pivoted to social entrepreneurship.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1987, he eliminated the company's philanthropic programs to cut costs. It's partially because of this that Apple retains a reputation as being among the least philanthropic companies.

Later in life, Jobs donated $50 million to Stanford Hospital and contributed an undisclosed amount of money to cure AIDS. Overall, Jobs is noteworthy and admirable for his business efforts, not for his charitable donations.

Related: As Steve Jobs Once Said, 'People with Passion Can Change the World'

How and when did Steve Jobs pass away?

Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Although he put off surgery in favor of alternative medicine solutions , he had to undergo a significant reconstructive surgery called the Whipple operation in 2004. Parts of his gallbladder, pancreas, bile duct and duodenum were removed.

Jobs recovered to lead Apple afterward, but in 2008, he lost significant weight. After a liver transplant in April 2009, Jobs' situation had become direr. August 2011 saw him resign as CEO of Apple, remaining chairman.

Unfortunately, he passed away due to respiratory arrest on October 5, 2011, at his Silicon Valley home. He was a fan of Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism. The Jobs family was with him in Palo Alto when he passed.

What are the best Steve Jobs quotes?

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was well known for many inspiring quotes .

Here are a few to keep in mind as you pursue your own business ambitions:

  • "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."
  • "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
  • "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
  • "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."
  • "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
  • "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."
  • "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
  • "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
  • "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, while else even be here?"

Related: 6 Reasons Why Steve Jobs Was Truly One of a Kind

What can Steve Jobs ' story teach you?

Steve Jobs had a significant impact on the computer and video industries.

His legacy will never be forgotten, and his business skills and lessons are essential materials for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to learn as they grow their own careers.

Check out Entrepreneur's other articles for more information about business leaders and other financial topics.

Entrepreneur Staff

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick Red Arrow

  • This Founder's Smart Sunglasses Retail for $849 — and He Crowdfunded More Than $300,000. Here's How He Came Up With the Idea That Could Revolutionize Eyewear .
  • Lock What's the Burnt Toast Theory? A Psychologist Explains the Mindset Hack That Can Make You Happier and More Successful .
  • This Workplace Expert's 'Brainwashing'-Esque Technique Will Help You Get the Raise You Deserve
  • Lock 15 Weird and Wonderful Side Hustles You Never Knew Existed
  • This Entrepreneur Is on a Mission to Eradicate Generational Poverty in the Black Community — And She's Using Franchising to Do It .
  • Lock This Retiree's Leisurely Side Hustle Makes $66,000 a Year and, 'You Don't Even Need to Go to High School to Do It'

Most Popular Red Arrow

How to successfully implement ai into your business — overcoming challenges and building a future-ready team.

Here are a few tips on how to navigate the challenges of adopting AI in the workplace and how to leverage AI to maximize your team's effectiveness.

This Non-Financial Skill Saved My Career — and We All Have the Ability to Harness It

This skill is an under-appreciated tool hiding in plain sight.

He Owns and Operates a Dozen Popular Nightlife Venues in New York — Here's How He Kept All of His Businesses Afloat in a Crisis

Thatcher Shultz tells us how to innovate — and stay in business — when your industry is hit hard.

Rivian Announces New Electric Vehicles That Will Cost a Lot Less — and Are 'Bursting With Personality'

The three midsized electric vehicles the company announced on Thursday will start at around $45,000.

5 Tips for Building a Strong Customer-Centric Culture and Fostering Brand Loyalty

Businesses must make customer service and satisfaction a top priority by fostering a customer-centric culture in order to build loyalty, engagement and overall success.

Does Your Brand Look too Corporate, or Dated? See How These Brands Leveled Up Their Design.

We live in a time when brands are more visible and visual than ever. Here, six founders explain how they created brand design that stands out.

Successfully copied link

comscore

Biography Online

Biography

Steve Jobs Biography

steve-jobs

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, 1955, to two university students Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born John Jandali. They were both unmarried at the time, and Steven was given up for adoption.

Steven was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, whom he always considered to be his real parents. Steven’s father, Paul, encouraged him to experiment with electronics in their garage. This led to a lifelong interest in electronics and design.

Jobs attended a local school in California and later enrolled at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. His education was characterised by excellent test results and potential. But, he struggled with formal education and his teachers reported he was a handful to teach.

At Reed College, he attended a calligraphy course which fascinated him. He later said this course was instrumental in Apple’s multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts.

Steve Jobs in India

In 1974, Jobs travelled with Daniel Kottke to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. They travelled to the Ashram of Neem Karoli Baba in Kainchi. During his several months in India, he became aware of Buddhist and Eastern spiritual philosophy. At this time, he also experimented with psychedelic drugs; he later commented that these counter-culture experiences were instrumental in giving him a wider perspective on life and business.

“Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” – Steve Jobs, The New York Times, Creating Jobs, 1997

Job’s first real computer job came working for Atari computers. During his time at Atari, Jobs came to know Steve Wozniak well. Jobs greatly admired this computer technician, whom he had first met in 1971.

Steve Jobs and Apple

In 1976, Wozniak invented the first Apple I computer. Jobs, Wozniak and Ronald Wayne then set up Apple computers. In the very beginning, Apple computers were sold from Jobs parents’ garage.

Over the next few years, Apple computers expanded rapidly as the market for home computers began to become increasingly significant.

In 1984, Jobs designed the first Macintosh. It was the first commercially successful home computer to use a graphical user interface (based on Xerox Parc’s mouse driver interface.) This was an important milestone in home computing and the principle has become key in later home computers.

Despite the many innovative successes of Jobs at Apple, there was increased friction between Jobs and other workers at Apple. In 1985, removed from his managerial duties, Jobs resigned and left Apple. He later looked back on this incident and said that getting fired from Apple was one of the best things that happened to him – it helped him regain a sense of innovation and freedom, he couldn’t find work in a large company.

Life After Apple

Steve_Jobs_and_Bill_Gates_(522695099)

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Photo Joi Ito

On leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT computers. This was never particularly successful, failing to gain mass sales. However, in the 1990s, NeXT software was used as a framework in WebObjects used in Apple Store and iTunes store. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT for $429 million.

Much more successful was Job’s foray into Pixar – a computer graphic film production company. Disney contracted Pixar to create films such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo. These animation movies were highly successful and profitable – giving Jobs respect and success.

In 1996, the purchase of NeXT brought Jobs back to Apple. He was given the post of chief executive. At the time, Apple had fallen way behind rivals such as Microsoft, and Apple was struggling to even make a profit.

Return to Apple

Steve_Jobs_with_the_Apple_iPad_no_logo

Photo: Matt Buchanan

Jobs launched Apple in a new direction. With a certain degree of ruthlessness, some projects were summarily ended. Instead, Jobs promoted the development of a new wave of products which focused on accessibility, appealing design and innovate features.

The iPod was a revolutionary product in that it built on existing portable music devices and set the standard for portable digital music. In 2008, iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in the US, with over six billion song downloads and over 200 million iPods sold.

In 2007, Apple successfully entered the mobile phone market, with the iPhone. This used features of the iPod to offer a multi-functional and touchscreen device to become one of the best-selling electronic products. In 2010, he introduced the iPad – a revolutionary new style of tablet computers.

The design philosophy of Steve Jobs was to start with a fresh slate and imagine a new product that people would want to use. This contrasted with the alternative approach of trying to adapt current models to consumer feedback and focus groups. Job’s explains his philosophy of innovative design.

“But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

– Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek (25 May 1998)

Apple has been rated No.1 in America’s most admired companies. Jobs management has been described as inspirational, although c-workers also state, Jobs could be a hard taskmaster and was temperamental. NeXT Cofounder Dan’l Lewin was quoted in Fortune as saying of that period, “The highs were unbelievable … But the lows were unimaginable.”

“My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” – All About Steve Jobs [link]

Under Jobs, Apple managed to overtake Microsoft regarding share capitalization. Apple also gained a pre-eminent reputation for the development and introduction of groundbreaking technology. Interview in 2007, Jobs said:

“There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.”

Despite, growing ill-health, Jobs continued working at Apple until August 2011, when he resigned.

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”

– Steve Jobs

Jobs earned only $1million as CEO of Apple. But, share options from Apple and Disney gave him an estimated fortune of $8.3billion.

Personal life

In 1991, he married Laurene Powell, together they had three children and lived in Palo Alto, California.

In 2003, he was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. Over the next few years, Jobs struggled with health issues and was often forced to delegate the running of Apple to Tim Cook. In 2009, he underwent a liver transplant, but two years later serious health problems returned. He worked intermittently at Apple until August 2011, where he finally retired to concentrate on his deteriorating health. He died as a result of complications from his pancreatic cancer, suffering cardiac arrest on 5 October 2011 in Palo Alto, California.

In addition to his earlier interest in Eastern religions, Jobs expressed sentiments of agnosticism.

“ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.”

Quote in Biography by Walter Isaacson.

Steve Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, a nonsectarian cemetery in Palo Alto.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Steve Jobs”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net. Published 25th Feb. 2012. Last updated 11th March 2019.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

Book Cover

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography at Amazon

Related pages

who's steve jobs biography

  •  Steve Jobs Quotes
  • All About Steve Jobs
  • Steve Jobs at BBC

This is beautiful. He’s one of my role models. RIP Jobs

  • January 20, 2019 7:27 AM

This is very inspirational to all of us in the world today. He made the impossible the possible, he will always be remembered for his great work done. Congrats Steve you are an inspiration!

  • January 16, 2019 5:29 PM

He made life easier for us all, nothing would be the way it is today without him.

  • December 19, 2018 2:19 PM

Steve job amazing man

  • October 27, 2018 7:01 AM
  • By Rambharat

I agree 100%.

  • December 05, 2018 9:13 PM
  • By Roman Lopez

Very nice biography

  • September 04, 2018 12:47 PM

Steve jobs! His lesson reminds alot,but Steve went to school ,through colleges he attained ajob that has resulted him into many champions in business and other s.now how can someone has no such gualification also leave such great impact.

  • December 05, 2017 1:35 AM
  • By Natanyakhu moses

web analytics

Steve Jobs Biography

who's steve jobs biography

Table of Contents

Steve Jobs was a computer designer, executive and innovator, as well as an all-around role model for many people in their professional and personal lives. As the co-founder of Apple Computers and the former chairman of Pixar Animation Studios, he revolutionized the computer and animation industries, amassing a fortune worth $10.2 billion at the time of his death. Jobs died at age 56 on Oct. 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, California, after battling pancreatic cancer for eight years.

Steve Jobs’ early life

Born in San Francisco, Jobs was adopted by an encouraging and loving family. He developed an interest in computers and engineering at a young age, inspired by his father’s machinist job and love for electronics. Growing up south of Palo Alto, Jobs was bright beyond comparison – his teachers wanted him to skip several grades and enter high school early, although his parents declined. When he did go to high school, Jobs met his future business partner, Steve Wozniak, with whom he bonded over their shared love for electronics and computer chips.

The start of Apple

After dropping out of college in his first semester, Jobs explored his spiritual side while traveling in India. It was through this spiritual enlightenment that Jobs’ work ethic and simplistic view toward life were developed. “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity,” he once said. “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Jobs began to move mountains at age 21 when he and Wozniak started Apple Computers in the Jobs family garage. To fund their venture, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his scientific calculator. This ended up being a good investment. Prior to Apple’s rise, computers were physically massive, expensive and not accessible by the everyday person. With Jobs heading up marketing and Wozniak in charge of technical development, Apple sold consumer-friendly machines that were smaller and cheaper, at only $666.66 each. The Apple II was more successful than the first model, and sales increased by 700%. On its first day of being a publicly traded company in 1980, Apple Computer had an estimated market value of $1.2 billion.

The original Apple-1 computers were sold at the $666.66 price point for two reasons: because Jobs and Wozniak wanted to sell the computer at a markup of one-third over the $500 wholesale price, and because Wozniak liked repeating digits.

Apple resignation and Pixar beginnings

But this success was short-lived, even with the praise for Jobs’ latest design, the Macintosh. IBM was Apple’s stiffest competition, and it began to surpass Apple’s sales. After a falling out with Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, Jobs resigned in 1985 to follow his own interests. He started a new software and hardware company, NeXT Inc., and he invested in a small animation company, Pixar Animation Studios.

Pixar became successful thanks to Jobs’ tenacity and evolving management style. Toy Story , Pixar’s first major success, took four years to make while the then-unknown animation company struggled. Jobs pushed its progress along by encouraging and prodding his team in critical and often abrasive ways. While some found his management style caustic, he also earned loyalty from many team members. “You need a lot more than vision – you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” Edwin Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, told the New York Times. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

Return to Apple

While Pixar succeeded, NeXT, trying to sell its own operating system to American consumers, floundered. Apple bought the company in 1997, and Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. Working for an annual salary of $1 a year (in addition to the millions of Apple shares he owned), Jobs revitalized Apple, and under his leadership, the company developed numerous innovative devices – namely, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and iTunes. Apple revolutionized mobile communications, music and even how numerous industries, including retail and healthcare, carried out their everyday business operations. He showed a unique intuition when developing these products. When asked what consumer and market research went into the iPad, Jobs reportedly replied, “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” according to his New York Times obituary.

Jobs used his personal experiences, such as growing up in the San Francisco area in the ’60s and his world travel, to shape the way he designed the products that made Apple synonymous with success. He criticized the sheltered lives that characterized many in the computer industry. “[They] haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he told Wired . “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Jobs considered every aspect of the consumer’s product experience, right down to the packaging. He created a small team of package designers dedicated to fine-tuning the unboxing experience.

Death and legacy

In 2004, Apple announced Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer. This brush with death helped Jobs focus his energy on developing the Apple products that rose to such popularity in the 2000s.

“Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,” he said in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford .

Though he was ill, it was during this time Apple launched some of its biggest (and most successful) creations. iTunes became the second-biggest music retailer in America, the MacBook Air revolutionized laptop computing, and the iPod and iPhone broke sales records while changing the way users consumed content and communicated with each other.

Jobs once said, “I want to put a ding in the universe.” After starting the personal computer revolution, launching the smartphone craze, changing the age of computer animation, and making technology popular and accessible, he made more than a ding.

Apple offers many more products and services today, including credit card financing , Apple Pay for secure and fast payments, and even an array of watch bands to keep you plugged in and stylish. Investigate what offerings may be best for your small business operations.

Steve Jobs’ innovative leadership style

Jobs emphasized the importance of teamwork to his employees. Though he made the final decision on product designs, he knew the right people are a company’s greatest asset. “That’s how I see business,” he said in a 2003 60 Minutes interview . “Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” [Read our tips on improving the hiring process .]

At the same time, Jobs knew he had to be the best leader possible to his teams. According to Jobs’ work mantra and ethic, innovation is what distinguishes a leader from a follower. Thanks to Jobs’ expectation of high quality, almost every product he turned out was a huge success among consumers and businesses.

Knowing your leadership type and strengths can have a profound impact on the success of your company.

Steve Jobs’ impact

Steve Jobs is still recognized today for making positive impacts in a number of areas:

Helped the environment

Jobs’ innovation led to the creation of products that save trees and help the environment. In situations where someone would typically use paper, such as in a presentation or a script reading, technology on devices like the iPad replaced it. The iPhone and iPad – groundbreaking products that ushered in a new generation of smart mobile technologies – ensure “paperless” is more and more the status quo. [Learn how to create a paperless office for your business.]

Revolutionized technology

While the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, it catapulted the mobile revolution forward and gave more freedom to individuals in their professional and personal lives. With an iPhone, professionals could answer calls, respond to emails, join webinars and more from their cellular device – in addition to having immediate access to music, movies and messages that fulfill their personal likes, needs and passions. [These are the tech trends we’re seeing in 2024.]

Created a faster world

Today’s world is more instantaneous than ever before, thanks to advancements by Jobs. His innovations ensure productivity thrives, like being able to make an appointment or reservation from your mobile phone and use your iPad as a point-of-sale (POS) system . With Jobs’ technology, businesses and customers have much smoother and quicker interactions. [Don’t miss our picks for the best POS systems .]

Steve Jobs quotes

Jobs’ approach to innovation and business offers entrepreneurs industry-agnostic inspiration more than a decade after his death. Many of his quotes remain inspiring today:

  • “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful – that’s what matters to me.”
  • “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
  • “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
  • “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”
  • “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the nonsuccessful ones is pure perseverance.”
  • “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
  • “I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”
  • “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Elaine J. Hom, Brittney Morgan and Jeanette Mulvey contributed to the writing and research in this article.

thumbnail

Building Better Businesses

Insights on business strategy and culture, right to your inbox. Part of the business.com network.

  • Collections
  • Publications
  • K-12 Students & Educators
  • Families & Community Groups
  • Plan Your Visit
  • Public Tours & Group Reservations
  • This Is CHM
  • Ways to Give
  • Donor Recognition
  • Institutional Partnerships
  • Buy Tickets
  • Hours & Admission
  • Upcoming Events

Chm Blog Remarkable People

Steve jobs: from garage to world’s most valuable company, by dag spicer | december 02, 2011.

Facebook

So we’re sitting in the payphone trying to make a blue box call. And the operator comes back on the line. And we’re all scared and we’d try it again. … And she comes back on the line; we’re all scared so we put in money. And then a cop car pulls up. And Steve was shaking, you know, and he got the blue box back into my pocket. I got it– he got it to me because the cop turned to look in the bushes for drugs or something, you know? So I put the box in my pocket. The cop pats me down and says, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s an electronic music synthesizer.” Wasn’t too musical. Second cop says, “What’s the orange button for?” “It’s for calibration,” says Steve.

— steve wozniak, lecture at computer history museum, 2002.

who's steve jobs biography

So begins one of the earliest chapters in the life of two remarkable young men whose youth, energy and enthusiasm transformed the world.

The “Blue Box” was a simple electronic gizmo that bypassed telephone company billing computers, allowing anyone to make free telephone calls anywhere in the world. The Blue Box was illegal, but the specifications for hacking into the telephone network were published in a telephone company journal and many youngsters with a flair for electronics built them. The “two Steves” had a great deal of fun building and using them for “ethical hacking,” with Wozniak building the kits and Jobs selling them—a pattern which would emerge again and again in the lives of these two innovators. (Wozniak once telephoned the Vatican, pretended to be Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the Pope—just to see if he could. When someone answered, Woz got scared and hung up.)

who's steve jobs biography

Wozniak and Jobs Blue Box, ca. 1972. The Blue Box allowed electronics hobbyists to make free telephone calls. CHM #X727.86

These early playful roots are what Wozniak remembers most fondly of Jobs. As columnist Mike Cassidy recalled in a San Jose Mercury News interview, what these two friends most remembered was “not bringing computers to the masses … or the many ‘aha’ moments designing computers. Instead, it’s the time the two tried to unfurl a banner depicting a middle finger salute from the roof of Homestead High School…” or their many Blue Box exploits. Walter Isaacson, Jobs’s official biographer, cites Jobs reflecting on the Blue Box:

If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into production.

— (isaacson, p. 30).

who's steve jobs biography

Steve Jobs (circled) at Homestead High School Electronics Club, Cupertino, California ca. 1969

Jobs, like Wozniak before him, attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, a solidly middle-class school in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. Homestead was progressive, with an innovative electronics program that shaped Wozniak’s life. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for some time. They met in 1971 when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced then 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. After hours, the two Steves would often meet at Hewlett-Packard lectures in Palo Alto, and both were hired by HP for a summer. Jobs graduated high school in 1972 and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon for a semester, during which he collected Coke bottles for money and ate free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. After drifting from class to class, Jobs left for India on a spiritual quest with Reed College friend Dan Kottke (who later became Apple employee #12). Jobs returned as a Buddhist and in 1974 began working at the legendary gaming company Atari as a technician.

The Homebrew Computer Club newsletter was a forum for hobbyists to exchange information and ideas.

The Homebrew Computer Club newsletter was a forum for hobbyists to exchange information and ideas.

The next year, Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of electronics and computer hobbyists in Silicon Valley who got together to explore the latest in a new technology, the microcomputer.

Wozniak, who had no formal engineering training, designed the Apple-1 computer as a way of “showing off” to the people at the Homebrew Club. Based on an inexpensive 6502 microprocessor, the Apple-1 came as a kit and was aimed squarely at hobbyists who wanted to own their own computer, even if they weren’t quite sure what they could do with it. The Apple-1 was a masterpiece of circuit design and its elegance impressed all who could appreciate its simple but powerful conception. Ever the salesman, Jobs quickly appreciated that there might be a demand for the Apple-1 beyond the geeky members of the Homebrew Club. Jobs showed an Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, owner of the local Byte Shop computer store, who placed an order for 50 of the machines—so long as they came pre-assembled. To obtain funds to purchase parts for the Apple-1, Jobs had obtained 30 days’ credit from suppliers—just long enough to enable Wozniak and Jobs to build the computers (mostly in Jobs’s parents’ garage) and get paid for them. To fund the circuit board layout of the Apple-1, Wozniak sold his beloved HP-65 calculator and Jobs his Volkswagen van. The Byte Shop order brought in $50,000, a “total shock” to Wozniak, who was earning one-tenth of that as an engineer at HP. The sale spurred Jobs into thinking about a new computer that anyone—not just those handy with a soldering iron—could afford and use.

who's steve jobs biography

Homebrew Computer Club meeting, 1978 Courtesy of Lee Felsenstein

who's steve jobs biography

Steve Jobs and Wozniak using Apple-1 system, ca. 1976 ©Apple, Inc. / Joe Melena

who's steve jobs biography

The Apple-1 kit computer introduced in 1976 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Early ad for the Apple-1 computer system, ca. 1976

Early ad for the Apple-1 computer system, ca. 1976

Funding this vision presented some challenges: the idea of people having their own computers was viewed as absurd at the time. Banks were unwilling to loan the two Steves money. After several unsuccessful visits with venture capitalists, Jobs met Mike Markkula, who, at 32, was already retired from Intel. Markkula was an electrical engineer with solid management skills who would provide “adult supervision” to the young company as well as something else: he personally invested $250,000. The three founded Apple Computer in January, 1977.

Steve and I get a lot of credit, but Mike Markkula was probably more responsible for our early success, and you never hear about him.

— steve wozniak, failure magazine, july 2000.

who's steve jobs biography

The original Apple II personal computer, the machine that propelled Apple into a global company (1977) Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs and Wozniak immediately moved forward with their new machine, the Apple II. It was a big improvement over the Apple-1. It had an integrated keyboard and case, could plug into a TV set for display, and was ready to run right out of the box. It also had color graphics, which made it unique among similar computers at the time such as the Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. It was a consumer item, not a kit for hobbyists.

If the Apple II featured typically brilliant Wozniak design, the marketing was vintage Jobs. This was Apple’s first mass-produced product, and Jobs sold it as a computer for everyone, from students to business professionals. The Apple II’s success was unprecedented, in part because, under Markkula’s urging, Apple donated or gave huge discounts to schools—ensuring that a new generation of students would learn about computers on an Apple. But the Apple II also enjoyed a business windfall with the arrival of the spreadsheet program VisiCalc in 1979. Powered by demand from both the education and business markets, Apple II sales soared. The Apple II would live on in various models until 1993—an astonishing 16 years. Early chants of “Apple II Forever” among the Apple faithful rang long and clear.

who's steve jobs biography

Apple Macintosh, 1984. The Mac revolutionized personal computing by introducing the graphical user interface (GUI), allowing anyone to use a computer CHM# 102633564 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs’s greatest triumph, however, was the 1984 Macintosh, “the computer for the rest of us.” Macintosh offered users an entirely new way of interacting: the graphical user interface (GUI). No longer would people have to learn special commands or have specialized training to use a computer. Now everyone who could point and click a mouse (even children) could run a computer. The Macintosh kicked off a new personal computer revolution, one that stressed intuition and use of a common graphical look and feel over memorization of computer codes.

Apple launched the Macintosh with a revolutionary television commercial produced by science fiction filmmaker Ridley Scott. The commercial aired only once—during the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast. Even with its splashy introduction and its breakthroughs in usability and design, however, the Mac started slowly in the marketplace and sales were modest in the first year. Moreover, Jobs’s intense personality, drive for perfection and difficult management style frequently clashed with others at Apple. In 1985, he suffered the same fortune as many Silicon Valley founders: he was fired by the board of directors. Jobs’s departure marked the end of an era and the beginning of a period of massive hits and equally big misses for him. That period would last for a decade.

Explore further

  • Learn more about the Homebrew Computerr Club in a CHM interview with Steve Wozniak
  • Look inside the Apple-1 manual
  • Learn about Apple’s vision for the Apple-II computer: Apple Computer Inc. Preliminary Confidential Offering Memorandum – 102712693
  • Learn about early Macintosh market plans: Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan, CHM# 102712692
  • Watch The Macintosh Marketing Story: Fact and Fiction, 20 Years Later, 102703180
  • The Changing Face of the Macintosh, Marcin Wichary

Watch vintage Steve Jobs footage on Apple

Two years ago we made a decision. We saw some new technology and we made a decision to risk our company.

— steve jobs’s next presentation, october 12, 1988, san francisco symphony hall.

who's steve jobs biography

Pixar Image Computer, 1986. This computer was used for generating images from complex data sets such as CAT scans, oil exploration or scenes from a virtual world. Disney purchased several dozen for use in animation. CHM# 102621974 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs spent the next ten years away from Apple but was by no means taking time off. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, renaming it Pixar. Pixar had started as a manufacturer of high-performance graphics hardware. Its main product was the Pixar Image Computer, a rendering engine for animation. While the computer was technically sophisticated, its high cost (about $130,000) made it appealing only to well-funded customers such as advanced medical research institutions and government laboratories. There was one exception: Disney. The legendary studio bought several dozen of the systems for use in animation.

who's steve jobs biography

Scene from Pixar’s computer-generated feature-length film Toy Story ©Pixar

Disney’s interest in Pixar’s hardware, however, was not enough to save the company from lackluster sales. Pixar finally sold its hardware division in 1990. Jobs shifted Pixar’s focus and concentrated it on producing short film sequences and commercials. The next year, partly due to the success of Pixar’s Oscar-winning “Tin Toy” short film, Pixar and Disney agreed to produce a computer generated film called “A Tin Toy Christmas.” Hollywood had met computing, and together Pixar and Disney would move computer-generated graphics from the niche of special effects to the heart of filmmaking itself.

who's steve jobs biography

Pixar brain trust: Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, John Lasseter ©Pixar

Using groundbreaking computer technology and some of the most skilled animators and storytellers in the world, Pixar produced the blockbuster film Toy Story, released in 1995. Toy Story proved that a feature-length motion picture could be entirely animated by computer and also made wildly entertaining. Pixar exploded as a Hollywood powerhouse, and its partnership with Disney produced some of the biggest box office hits of the decade. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006, earning more than $7 billion from his initial $10 million investment and becoming Disney’s largest single shareholder.

who's steve jobs biography

The NeXT Cube (1990) was a masterpiece of engineering… but was too expensive. NeXT evolved into a software company after the Cube and several other NeXt hardware products failed in the marketplace. NeXT’s greatest innovation was the NeXTSTEP operating environment CHM# 102626734

While Pixar was beginning to work its magic, Jobs was working in parallel on another computer startup. His new company, NeXT, set out to build high-performance UNIX workstations for the educational and scientific market. The machines, introduced in 1990, were prototypically Jobs: elegant, well-engineered and easy to use, but the NeXT “Cube” was too expensive for mass appeal. Although it had high-performance hardware, the NeXT delivered its greatest innovation in the form of its “object-oriented” operating system, NeXTStep. Yet despite its originality and power, the NeXT system struggled to find its place in the market. It did, however, have a significant claim to fame: a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web on a NeXT. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, mainly for its software and operating system, and Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant.

who's steve jobs biography

Jobs with the original iMac, 1998 ©Apple Inc. / Moshe Brakha

Jobs joined an Apple that was in no better shape than the company from which he had been unceremoniously fired. It was losing money at a catastrophic rate. Its product line was bloated and confusing. Its marketing was ineffective. Its innovations in user interfaces and software had long since been eclipsed by Microsoft’s Windows and applications for the Windows system, which had become the de facto standard for personal computing worldwide. And Apple seemingly had no strategy for capitalizing on the internet, which was exploding as a force in home and business computing.

A year after returning to Apple, Jobs was named interim CEO, replacing Gil Amelio in July 1997. Apple had lost more than $700 million the preceding quarter. It was running out of money and it looked as if it might not survive. Jobs quickly sought new financing, terminated languishing projects, fired hundreds of people and focused the company on just a desktop computer and a laptop for professionals and for consumers. The first desktop computer from the new Jobs era was the iMac (1998). Ultimately available in several colors of the rainbow, the iMac emphasized connection to the Internet and—Jobs’s mantra—simplicity. Out of the box, the iMac could be on the Internet in just two easy steps. “There is no Step 3,” Apple claimed. The iMac and its distinctive design also marked the first tangible collaboration between Jobs and Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer with whom he would form a legendary partnership.

  • Learn about the roots of Pixar. Watch the CHM lecture: Pixar: A Human Story of Computer Animation

One More Thing

The return of elvis would not have provoked a bigger sensation, — jim carlton, january 1997, the wall street journal, from “steve jobs,” by walter isaacson.

In 2000, the Apple board removed the term “interim” from Jobs’s CEO title, cementing his permanent return to the company he had co-founded. It must have seemed a glorious triumph for Jobs personally. For the Apple faithful, it represented a glimmer of hope that the resurgent company they loved might have a chance. Perhaps no one within or outside Apple—with the possible exception of Jobs himself—could foresee that the company was embarking on one of the most remarkable decades any company in any industry had ever experienced.

who's steve jobs biography

iPod Evaluation and Test Prototype (2001). The original iPod had a miniaturized 5GB hard disk drive and could “store 1,000 songs in your pocket.” CHM# 102633636 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Innovations came in rapid-fire succession. In 2001, Apple introduced OS X, the new operating system for the Mac platform. OS X marked the total redesign of the Mac operating system from the ground up. It was a direct result of Apple’s NeXT acquisition and was based on NeXT’s OPENSTEP environment and the BSD Unix system developed at UC Berkeley.

That same year Apple opened its first retail store, in Tysons Corner, Virginia. It was a daring step at a time when computer companies had long since abandoned their own branded retail outlets in favor of “big box” electronic superstores and internet shopping. Like Apple products themselves, the stores reflected an austere simplicity and were organized not by product category but by how Jobs believed people wanted to use them. Products were stylishly arranged for direct use by customers in a minimalist, almost laboratory-like zone of utilitarian consumerism. As usual, Jobs sweated the details, ensuring the marble floors were the right color and the washroom signs were not too obtrusive. A “Genius Bar” staffed by Apple experts answered customer problems on-site. The stores were hailed as a perfect blend of the products Apple made and the brand itself.

The most momentous event of 2001, however, was the introduction of the iPod digital music player. Although not a new idea, Apple’s take on the device featured an easy-to-use interface and, thanks to new miniaturized hard drive technology, a prodigious amount of music storage. Jobs announced the iPod with the slogan “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Music was sync’d to the iPod through the iTunes software application, another Apple innovation. As of October 2011, more than 300 million iPods had been sold worldwide.

In 2003, Jobs introduced an even more radical innovation: the iTunes store and music management system. The iTunes platform represented the successful integration of retail music, portable player, e-commerce, digital rights management and a simple desktop environment where users could manage their music libraries. Jobs convinced powerful and deeply skeptical music company executives that, together, the iPod and iTunes system represented a legitimate and profitable alternative to music piracy, which was then rampant through bootleg services such as Napster and LimeWire. In exchange, Jobs won a revolutionary concession from the music industry: flat-rate pricing of 99 cents per downloaded song. The iTunes concept revolutionized the retail music industry, and sounded the death knell for brick-and-mortar record stores. As of October 2011, the iTunes music store had sold more than 16 billion songs.

The iPod marked a turning point in Apple’s strategy. Jobs sought to move Apple beyond computers and into Apple-powered consumer devices. It was a very bold gamble, and the success of the iPod and iTunes showed that the strategy could win on two levels: it eroded traditional industry structures, and it catapulted Apple into a widely recognized global consumer brand.

who's steve jobs biography

iPhone, 2007 CHM# 102716304 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Steve Jobs unveiling iPhone to the world

Steve Jobs unveiling iPhone to the world

At the 2007 Macworld trade show, Jobs announced that Apple would drop the word “Computer” from its name and become simply “Apple Inc.” The move solidified the profound shift in the company’s direction and signaled its seemingly unlimited ambition in the multi-billion dollar market for switched-on consumer products. At the Macworld show, Jobs also saved his customary “one more thing” portion of his presentation for another blockbuster announcement: the iPhone. He described it as nothing less than the re-invention of the telephone: a combination “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” a “revolutionary mobile phone,” and a “breakthrough Internet communicator.”

When the iPhone went on-sale, thousands of people worldwide waited patiently outside Apple stores, sometimes for days, to be first to purchase one. This remarkable show of brand loyalty reflected how deeply Apple products had connected with their users on a personal level. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone sold briskly and transformed another industry (telephones) by making the smartphone an established category of “must-have” device, for everyone from teenagers to business executives. The iPhone was a computer at its core: it ran Apple’s iOS operating system, which was based on Mac OS X, its desktop operating system. To add extra capabilities, the user downloaded ‘apps’ (applications) from the iTunes App Store, launched in July 2008. By October 2011, more than 18 billion apps had been downloaded.

iPad (2010)

Jobs’s last major product launch was the iPad, a tablet computer optimized for media consumption, quick emails, and web browsing. Like the previous iPod and iPhone iOS devices, the iPad pioneered an entirely new set of experiences and possibilities for users. Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, and within a year software developers had introduced more than 100,000 apps for the device, ranging from navigation aids to cameras to wildly popular games and ways both to create and consume every type of media. Yet unlike the iPod and the iPhone, the iPad did not simply improve upon a major segment of consumer electronics: it invented a largely new category. The iPad was another triumph of Apple engineering and marketing, one deeply shaped by Jobs at every step.

who's steve jobs biography

Outpouring of remembrances and ‘thanks’ to Steve Jobs, Apple store, Palo Alto, California, Oct 8, 2011 © All rights reserved by troialynn

Certain qualities persisted throughout Jobs’s career, from the Apple-1 to the iPad. One was an unshakable determination to create something of beauty, in the aesthetic and engineering senses of that word. Another was enormously successful risk-taking, from selling his van to finance the Apple-1 to perfecting the music player, telephone and tablet computer. Another was Jobs’s uncanny ability to focus on a larger vision—and, in the case of consumers, to anticipate whole categories of needs that few of his rivals saw. Finally, especially in the iOS devices, Jobs engaged in “ecosystem thinking,” a drive to integrate radical new hardware advances with bold new software and services. iTunes and the App Stores were as critical to the success of iOS devices as the hardware itself, and established Apple not simply as an unparalleled product company but also as a global content distribution company.

Jobs once said his goal in life was “to make a dent in the universe.” Isaacson asserts that Jobs changed seven industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, telephones, tablet computing, digital publishing and retail stores. At the end of this life, Jobs saw Apple surpass Exxon as the most valuable company in the world as measured in market capitalization. Ultimately, Jobs made his dent, and more. A fitting tribute, borrowed from the tomb of English architect Sir Christopher Wren, might be: Si monumentum requires circumspice. “If you seek his monument, look around you.”

Steven Paul Jobs was born February 24, 1955, and died October 5, 2011.

  • Steve Jobs original iPod introduction
  • Watch the CHM lecture: Steve Jobs: The Authorized Biography. An Evening with Walter Isaacson
  • Stanford University Commencement Speech
  • Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011
  • Michael Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World, New York: Overlook Press, 2010
  • Smithsonian Oral History
  • Charlie Rose

About The Author

Dag Spicer oversees the Museum’s permanent historical collection, the most comprehensive repository of computers, software, media, oral histories, and ephemera relating to computing in the world. He also helps shape the Museum’s exhibitions, marketing, and education programs, responds to research inquiries, and has given hundreds of interviews on computer history and related topics to major print and electronic news outlets such as NPR, the New York Times, The Economist, and CBS News. A native Canadian, Dag most recently attended Stanford University before joining the Museum in 1996.

Join the Discussion

Related articles, in memoriam: niklaus wirth (1934–2024), in memoriam: john warnock (1940–2023), in memoriam: gordon moore (1929-2023).

History and Biography

Entrepreneurs

Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs Biography

The well-known businessman, computer genius, and even digital entertainment Steve Paul Jobs , better known as Steve Jobs , was born in the city of San Francisco, California, the United States, on February 24, 1955, and died in the city of Palo Alto, California, United States, on October 5, 2011. He is recognized for his role as the co-founder of Apple Inc. In addition to having held the position of CEO in the same company. But on all these aspects highlights the fact of being co-creator of the first personal computer.

Steve was born as the first child of the American Joanne Carole Schieble and the Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a couple of university students who did not have the means to take care of the child, so he was given up for adoption to the marriage formed by Paul and Clara Jobs. They would then adopt a girl named Patty to grow up with Steve. Sometime later the biological parents of this would marry, having their second child: the novelist Mona Simpson.

Paul Jobs worked as a train driver for a railroad company, while his mother was a housewife. In spite of not having all the means available, they tried to ensure that their adopted children had the best possible education available. By 1961, the family moved to the city of Mountain View, this place was beginning to emerge as an important epicenter of technological development that would undoubtedly influence Steve Jobs. There he continued his studies at Cupertino Middle School, ending at Homestead H.S. Paul Jobs repaired cars at home, accompanied by the inventions exhibited to the children by the Hewlett-Packard (HP) group, caused Steve a great interest in the electronic aspect, added to the taste for creating things from his own imagination and means.

“Sometimes when you do not have time, you have to borrow it.” Steve Jobs

He constantly occupied his time in his studies and attended lectures by the Hewlett-Packard group. One day, in the midst of a conference, Steve impressed the company’s president William Hewlett, who offered him to work for them as a part-time employee on summer vacation. About this time in the company, he would meet Steve Wozniak, a person with his same interests and with whom he would develop a good friendship. Due to the high costs of education at Reed College in Portland, after six months enrolled he dropped out in 1972. However, he still attended classes as a listener.

After scarcely surviving doing work from which he obtained little profit, in 1974 he returned to California. His intention with this return was to start from that city a trip to India to start a spiritual encounter with himself and seek enlightenment. In 1976, back in California, Steve got involved in the idea of ​​Wozniak about creating themselves a computer, goal that they reached the following year after much work in the garage of Steve, calling the project Apple I.

Finally, he would take care of making the invention known, interesting potential investors to finance their invention. Scott McNealy, manager and engineer in the process of retiring from Intel by then, was the one who would collaborate on the Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak project.

For the year of 1977, Wozniak and Jobs manufacture the model Apple II, which is exhibited in an event known as West Coast Computer Fair. This fact catapulted the interest of the invention and positioned the company Apple Inc. Creation of both young people in a point of high commercial interest, achieving something that was considered improbable: to have a very successful company at a young age. After the success that brought the Apple II, the next step would be the creation of a computer accessible to people who did not have computer skills. At the beginning of 1983, this new project named Lisa was born. Unfortunately, its high cost in the market did not allow it to be accessible to all people, with IBM products preferred. This would be the first failure committed by the company.

For the next year, Steve Jobs would not give up and try to put the idea back into play with a different model: the Apple Macintosh. This model was more economical and included a mouse. However, it did not meet market expectations. After this new defeat, he left his own company in the year of 1985. The following year he would buy the shares of a computerized animation studio that would later be known as Pixar. Under the direction of Jobs, several contracts were made for the production of films for the company Walt Disney.

“Your time is limited, so do not waste it living someone else’s life. Do not get caught up in the dogma, that is to live like others think you should live. Do not let the noises of others’ opinions silence your own inner voice. And, most importantly, have the courage to do what your heart and your intuition tell you. They already know in some way what you really want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Steve Jobs

At the same time, Jobs was dedicated to the creation of a new computer company and a new computer model, both would be known as NeXT. The new proposed model was barely noticed in the market, did not receive red numbers but either favorable sales. In 1996, Apple would acquire the rights to the software of this computer, at the same time that its founder would return to the company. This re-entry of Jobs served to further increase the reach of Apple, signing contracts with Microsoft and Intel.

On August 24, 2011, resigned again, but this time definitively, because of the serious health problems that he was suffering prevent him from working properly. Since 2003, he had been diagnosed with cancer in the pancreas, the following year he would stay in treatment. However, his condition continued to get worse since then.

Finally, his body could not take it anymore, dying on October 5, 2011, in his own home. After an exclusive funeral, his body was deposited in the Alta Mesa Cemetery Memorial Park in the city of Palo Alto.

who's steve jobs biography

You may like

Robert Oppenheimer Biography

Robert Oppenheimer

Paris Hilton Biography

Paris Hilton

Threads History

Tina Turner

History of Salsa

History of Salsa

who's steve jobs biography

The history of television

Luciano Benetton

Luciano Benetton Biography

Luciano Benetton Biography

Luciano Benetton (May 13, 1935) Born in Ponzano, Treviso, Italy. An Italian businessman and fashion designer, co-founder of the Benetton Group company, one of the most popular and important fashion companies in the world. After working for several years as a clerk in a clothing store, Benetton ventured as an entrepreneur selling the garments her sister made. When he won recognition, he created with his brothers the firm Fratelli Benetton (1965), with which he expanded and ventured into various commercial sectors linked to the world of fashion, such as perfumery. Under his command, the company became famous in the nineties for the publication of a series of controversial advertisements directed by Oliviero Toscani. He entered politics in the 1990s and left the company in charge of his son in 2012.

FAMILY AND BEGINNINGS

Born in an Italian province with an extensive textile tradition, Benetton had as a father a small businessman who died of malaria in 1945, having emigrated to Africa to work as a truck driver. Benetton, who at that time was only nine years old, left school to work and be able to support his mother and three sisters. He got a job as a clerk in a fabric and clothing store, where he stayed for several years. In 1955, a young twenty-year-old Benetton proposed to his sister, who at the time worked weaving clothes for a workshop, who worked together and created their own business, she would cook and sell her work in various stores.

With little money the two of them started their project and understanding that they had to sacrifice their comfort to grow, they sold some of their personal items, such as a bicycle, a guitar and other objects of little value, with which they collected the money to buy their first machine to knit. At that time, his sister Giuliana spent more than 18 hours in front of the machine, creating her first jerseys, which Luciano initially sold at the store she worked on and shortly thereafter began promoting them in other stores, gradually winning a clientele faithful. Determined to grow the business, Benetton created his own sample and presented it to various merchants in the town, in a short time getting his first large order, which consisted of 700 garments.

As the demand progressively increased, the brothers began to expand and hire more artisan employees, making themselves known in the region for their work and quality. Thanks to their hard work and the recompense they had, they founded in 1965 the commercial firm Fratelli Benetton, together with their brothers Gilberto and Carlo. The four brothers continued to work and publicize the brand, which in a short time became one of the best-known clothing companies in the country. By the end of the 1960s, the company opened its first headquarters abroad, establishing a store in Paris.

LUCIANO BENETTON’S PATH

After creating his signature Fratelli Benetton with his three brothers (Giuliana, Gilberto, and Carlo), Benetton took command of the company in 1974, at which time the company was known nationally and internationally. By the mid-1970s, the Benetton group was a multinational that had nine factories, five in its country and four abroad (Scotland, Spain, the United States, and France). Over the years the company continued to grow and to reach more than 1,300 stores abroad by the end of the 1980s. In addition to stores in the United States, Spain, France, and Scotland, they had stores in Bucharest (Romania), Prague (Czech Republic) and Budapest (Hungary). Each year the group sold more than seventy million garments and earned more than 152,000 million pesetas, trading on the stock exchanges in Frankfurt, Tokyo and New York (Wall Street). These gains made him one of the most prominent textile sector entrepreneurs of the time, along with great personalities such as Amancio Ortega and Isak Andic.

Understanding that the business needed to diversify to continue growing, Benetton launched a bathroom line, created a perfume manufactured by Hermés and designed a financial holding company called Edizione, which diversified in infrastructure, beverages, food, real estate, and agriculture. In a short time Edizione bought Nordica, a renowned sporting goods and clothing company for it, with which it was not only established as one of the most relevant companies in Italy, but also as one of the most complete fashion companies in the world (casual clothes, sports clothes and work clothes, etc).

The company’s success was affected in the 1990s, with the publication of a series of controversial commercials directed by photographer Oliviero Toscani. In the ads you could see a newborn baby covered in blood, a nun kissing a priest and a family accompanying a dying young man with AIDS. Although the campaign was designed to make the viewer reflect on the importance of the other, human rights and miscegenation, the message was lost and the viewers were scandalized, criticizing the firm for the proposal. Criticism continued when Benetton appeared naked covering her private parts in a newspaper to announce the Clothing Redistribution Project campaign , a charitable operation that sought to collect used clothing and send it to the Third World.

Although he was harshly criticized for his campaigns and eccentricity, Benetton entered politics in 1992. He obtained a seat in the Senate as a member of the Italian Republican Party, however, his passage through it was overshadowed by the emergence of the investigation against him for the bankruptcy of Fiorucci. Leaving politics and focused on business, Benetton secured a large number of properties in Argentina, becoming one of the most important landowners in the country. By the end of the 1990s, the company had expanded, earning more than 300,000 million pesetas a year. In the new millennium, he included in his business his sons Alessandro and Rocco, who were in charge of the company at his departure in 2012 . The story of this renowned designer and businessman was collected in the Benetton autobiography, the color of success (1991).

Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton Biography

Louis Vuitton Biography

Louis Vuitton (August 4, 1821 – February 25, 1892) businessman and fashion designer. Founder of the leather goods brand Louis Vuitton. He was born in Anchay, France. His parents were Xavier Vuitton, a farmer, and his mother Coronne Vuitton, a woman who dedicated herself to making hats. At the age of 16, Louis gets a job as a trunk manufacturer, an occupation that allowed him to move to Paris.

In 1854, he opened a shop in Paris at number 4 on the rue Neuve-des-Capucines that would become one of the reference brands at the end of the 20th century. Subsequently, he served as luggage provider for Empress Eugenie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III. His biggest goal in his life project was to create a leather bag workshop, he was passionate about the design of these items. So, with his savings, he opened the Atelier in 1859, a workshop of handmade leather bags and suitcases. This place was very symbolic and special for him because his child grew up there: Georges Vuitton, his mother was Clemence-Emilie Parriaux.

His workshop was very successful and popular because of the exclusivity of the designs and the quality of the materials used in his work, Vuitton became a benchmark for luxury leather goods. In 1885, he opened a store in London. At the time, he developed the Tumbler lock that made travel trunks much safer. In 1867, he won the bronze medal at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. Empress Eugenia de Montijo remained her best client, her support would be crucial for her commercial development.

Louis Vuitton died on February 5, 1892, while in Asnières-Sur-Seine, France. His son followed in his footsteps but did not continue with the company, which did not end because it was commanded by other people. Its success was such that decades later the company had 225 workers. In 1896, Louis Vuitton company designed the monogram canvas with which it differs from other brands. Georges patented the Louis Vuitton lock, a revolutionary and very effective system that could not be opened even by the great American illusionist Harry Houdini.

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He is considered the father of the Management to which he devoted more than 60 years of his professional life. His parents of Jewish origin and then converted to Christianity moved to a small town called Kaasgrabeen. Drucker grew up in an environment in which new ideas and social positions created by intellectuals, senior government officials and scientists were emerging. He studied at the Döbling Gymnasium and in 1927, Drucker moved to the German city of Hamburg, where he worked as an apprentice in a cotton company.

Then he began to train in the world of journalism, writing for the Der Österreichische Volkswirt. Then he got a job in Frankfurt, his job was to write for the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. Meanwhile, he completed a doctorate in International Law. Drucker began to integrate his two facets and for that, he was a recognized journalist. Drucker worked in this place until the fall of the Weimar Republic. After this period he decided to move to London, where he worked in a bank and was also a student of John Maynard Keynes .

Although he was a disciple of Keynes, he assured, decades later, that Keynesianism failed as an economic thesis where it was applied. Because of the ravages of Nazism and persecution of Jews, he emigrated to the United States, where he served as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, from 1939 to 1949 and simultaneously was a writer. His first job as a consultant was in 1940. He then returned to teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Thanks to his popularity he received a position to teach in the faculty of Business Administration of the University of New York.

He was an active contributor for a long period of time to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and was a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. The quality and recognition of his writings assured him important contracts both as a writer and as a consultant with large companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Quickly and surprisingly his fortune grew. Drucker served as honorary president of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

In 1971, he obtained the Clarke Chair of Social Sciences and Administration at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Claremont. Now, at present Drucker is considered the most successful of the exponents in matters of administration, his ideas and terminologies have influenced the corporate world since the 40s. Drucker was the first social scientist to use the expression “post-modernity” something that caught the attention of this man is that he does not like receiving compliments. He was simple, visionary, satirical and vital.

Within his studies, he says that his greatest interest is people. His work as a consultant began in the General Motors Multinational Companies, from that moment begins to raise the theory of Management, Management trends, the knowledge society. Thanks to this theory he has published several books, these are consulted often and are fundamental for the career of business administrator. In his works, he deals with the scientific, human, economic, historical, artistic and philosophical stage.

He was founder and director of a business school that bears his name. For Drucker, it was beneficial that many of his ideas have been reformed because of the innovative way of thinking and analyzing business issues. Although approaches such as the knowledge society are the basis of the current company and the future is still maintained. He has published more than thirty books, which include studies of Management, studies of socio-economic policies and essays. Some are Best Sellers. The first book was The end of economic man (1939), The future of industrial man (1942), The concept of Corporation (1946). Later he published The Effective Executive (1985). He focused on personal effectiveness and changes in the direction of the 21st century. In 2002 the society of the future was published.

His first book caused much controversy because he talked about the reasons why fascism initiated and analyzed the failures of established institutions. He urged the need for a new social and economic order. Although he had finished the book in 1933, he had to wait because no editor wanted to accept such horrible visions. Now, Drucker has dealt with such controversial issues as individual freedom, industrial society, big business, the power of managers, automation, monopoly, and totalitarianism.

We must indicate that his analysis of the Administration, is a valuable guide for the leaders of companies that need to study their own performance, diagnose its failures and improve its productivity, as well as that of your company. Several companies have taken their approaches and put them into practice, such as Sears Roebuck & Co., General Motors, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and American Telephone & Telegraph.

The consultant assured that there are some differences between the figure of the manager and that of the leader. For him, true leaders recognize their shortcomings as mortal beings, but they systematically concentrate on the essentials and work tirelessly to acquire the decisive competences of management. Actually, the contributions of this character in the world of administration and in the economic and social world have been significant. Drucker died on November 11, 2005, leaving a great legacy.

Paul Allen biography

Paul Allen biography

Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953) entrepreneur, business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He was born in Seattle, Washington, United States. Allen attended Lakeside School, a private school located in Seattle, and became friends with Bill Gates , who was three years younger and shared a common enthusiasm for computers. His parents encouraged him from childhood to be curious and very dedicated to studying. At the age of 14, he became interested in computer science, scrutinizing computers internally and externally.

When the school was over, Allen went to the Washington State University, although when he had been studying for two years he decided to leave the school with his friend Bill Gates, who was studying at the prestigious Harvard University. Both felt that it was more useful to begin to devise commercial software for the new personal computers. At first, the brand was called Micro-Soft and was installed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first sale was in 1975, and they started selling a BASIC language interpreter. Allen had an impressive business spirit so he was instrumental in achieving a project that aimed to acquire an operating system called MS-DOS for $ 50,000.

Gates and Allen managed to supply the operating system for the new IBM PCs. As of this moment, the company suffered constant and ascending progress. Maybe young people would not imagine the scope that Microsoft could have. But after several years of work, effort, and progress Allen had to separate from Gates and leave the company because of a serious illness, Hodgkin’s disease, which did not allow him to perform his duties. Allen had to undergo several months of radiotherapy treatment and a bone marrow SDF transplant.

Once recovered, he returned to Microsoft in 1990, but at that time the fate of Bill was already cast: he was the richest person in the world. Although Bill never turned his back on him and placed him in an important management position. He started working on an idea that a few months later became a reality, this is Vulcan Ventures Inc. in Washington: a venture capital fund specialized in cable and broadband services. With this idea Allen has participated in more than 140 companies, the most prominent are Priceline, Dreamworks, GoNet, Oxygen, and Metricom.

The money he earns he invests it in a variety of issues, and one of them is in the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team. As a fan of this sport, he decided to invest more than 70 million dollars for that team in 1988. A short time ago, he invested 200 million dollars for the Seattle Seahawks. In short, he is one of the minority owners of the Major League Soccer team, and of the Seattle Sounders FC. One of his passions is music, specifically Rock and Roll. He also spends many hours playing the guitar in his professional recording studio installed in his house.

Allen has not only invested in sports and personal passions, but he has also funded the Museum Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle. He has done this because of his interest in extraterrestrial life. Like every philanthropist, he has founded several charitable organizations. Allen’s contribution to Microsoft gave him great momentum and it was very significant, he decided to retire in the year 2000. After this Bill Gates published in the official account a moving statement, where he acknowledged the contribution of Allen to the success of the company.

This made him a great strategic advisor. That year, he sold 68 million shares, but still owns 138 million, which makes up the bulk of his wealth. This is proven in the investments he has in more than 50 technology and entertainment companies. For example, Experience Music Project, Entertainment Properties Inc., Charitable Foundations, Vulcan Ventures Inc., First & Goal Inc., and Clear Blue Sky Productions are just some of them. He made a significant investment in young and promising companies in the Internet sector such as Priceline, Click2learn, and Netperceptions.

Unfortunately, he did not manage to invest in one of the most successful and profitable companies in the Internet sector and with a promising future: eBay.com. It is not a secret that Allen puts the eye and the signature, where the best opportunities reside. The experience and success of Allen in recent years, prove him as one of the best investors worldwide. Allen’s investment strategy focuses on companies with future technology. Allen says that the next boom will be in the interactive sector. Paul Allen appears on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world, in 2009 the first was his friend and fellow, Bill Gates , while Allen has something less than 17,500 million dollars.

Nik Powell biography

Nik Powell biography

Nik Powell (November 4, 1950) businessman and co-founder of the Virgin Group. He was born in Great Kingshill, Buckinghamshire, England.  Powell studied at the Longacre School and then left school because his family moved to Little Malvern. Then, he entered a small Catholic high school called St. Richard’s. He always showed a great ability for mathematical questions and for writing. Then he attended high school at Ampleforth College a high school located in North Yorkshire. Upon graduation, he entered the University of Sussex. But a year later he retired and began operating a mail order company, a small record store, and a recording studio.

The intentions to grow were increased, so the partners established Virgin Records in 1972. Little by little, the record began to bear fruit until years later it was recognized as one of the main record labels in the United Kingdom. In the year 1992, it was sold to EMI. During this time, Powell and Stephen Woolley came together to start the project that had as its object the foundation of a production company called Palace Productions. She was responsible for the production of The Company of Wolves (1984), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992). But, although they achieved great things, the company collapsed in 1992 due to a series of inconclusive contracts and debts.

Without leaving his dreams behind, Powell began working in the film industry this time with Scala Productions, responsible for the production of Fever Pitch, Twenty Four Seven, Last Orders, B. Monkey and Ladies in Lavender. Since then he has been the president of this company. Simultaneously accepted the position of director of the National School of Film and Television in 2003. This decision was very controversial and caused great controversy because there were many people from academia who claimed that Powell was not prepared for the position. For a few years, he received the support of his wife Merrill Tomassi, from whom he divorced.

Later he married the singer Sandie Shaw, Powell was very important in the relaunching of her artistic career. They had two children, Amie and Jack, and they divorced in the 1990s. The distinguished career in the media industry, first in music as a co-founder of Virgin Records and later as a producer of several award-winning films allowed Nik to handle with excellence the School and be welcomed and respected by his students, the above has also gained more popularity to the institution.

Nik has not left his close ties with the leaders of the music and film industry, and also served as a trustee of BAFTA, where he chaired the Film Committee. While chairing the NFTS, Nik has been responsible for a remarkable transformation of the School that has grown in infrastructure and in importance and quality. It has been recognized as one of the best film schools in the world and now he can welcome more students because its academic offer is wider: masters, diploma, certificates and short courses in the film, television and games industries.

In recent years, the school received its accreditation from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Being then an accredited institution of higher education. A few years ago the NFTS was equipped with two buildings and a new digital television studio 4K. The president of the School has extended and made public his thanks to the work of Powell, and to the great achievements that the students of this school have made. They have been winners of several awards, such as four Oscar nominations, seven BAFTA and 10 Cilect Global Student Film awards.

Many NFTS graduate students are working in the best film, television, and gaming industries in the United Kingdom. But, after 14 years under the direction of the school, Powell decided to retire from this position in June 2017. Although he resigned from his position, he affirmed that he will continue supporting everything he can to his beloved institution. Powell appeared on the Queen’s 2018 New Year’s Honors list. Powell received an OBE. His partner Richard Branson has also recognized his work and admires his work. He also works with novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach.

After his retirement he realized, against all odds, that if he could get ahead in the role of academic director of such a prestigious institution, he could also found Virgin, enter the world of cinema, among other things. During his time as director, he took great pains to expand scholarships for students who do not have the economic capacity, and also encouraged the entry of women into the institution. And finally, he was very efficient with financing from large film industries. Powell is an inspiring man and was an important figure for the NFTS.

Celebrities

Nicola Porcella Biography

Nicola Porcella

Nicola Porcella Biography Nicola Emilio Porcella Solimano (February 5, 1988), better known as Nicola Porcella, is an actor and TV...

Wendy Guevara Biography

Wendy Guevara

Wendy Guevara Biography Wendy Guevara Venegas (August 12, 1993), better known as Wendy Guevara, is an influencer, actress, singer, and...

Paris Hilton Biography Paris Whitney Hilton (February 17, 1981), better known as Paris Hilton, is a socialite, businesswoman, model, DJ,...

Biography of Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio

Biography of Leonardo DiCaprio Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio is a renowned actor and film producer who has won numerous awards within...

Biography of Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington

Biography of Denzel Washington Denzel Washington is an African American actor born on December 28, 1954 in Mount Vernon, New...

Biography of Ryan Reynolds

Ryan Reynolds

Biography of Ryan Reynolds Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born on October 23, 1976 in Vancouver, Canada, and he is a...

Biography of Brad Pitt

Biography of Brad Pitt William Bradley Pitt, better known as Brad Pitt, was born on December 18, 1963 in Shawnee,...

Luciano Benetton Biography

Luciano Benetton Biography Luciano Benetton (May 13, 1935) Born in Ponzano, Treviso, Italy. An Italian businessman and fashion designer, co-founder...

Louis Vuitton Biography

Louis Vuitton Biography Louis Vuitton (August 4, 1821 – February 25, 1892) businessman and fashion designer. Founder of the leather...

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker biography Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born...

Paul Allen biography

Paul Allen biography Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953) entrepreneur, business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He was born in Seattle,...

Nik Powell biography

Nik Powell biography Nik Powell (November 4, 1950) businessman and co-founder of the Virgin Group. He was born in Great...

The Early Influences That Shaped Jobs‘ Vision

  • by history tools
  • November 11, 2023

Dear reader, let me walk you through the captivating life story of Steve Jobs, the brilliant visionary who transformed personal technology and introduced innovations that became integral to our daily lives. This comprehensive account illustrates how Jobs revolutionized no less than six industries and left an unparalleled legacy of ingenuity.

Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco and adopted by loving parents who encouraged his early interest in electronics. His father, a machinist, taught him mechanical skills and the values of craftsmanship from an early age.

In 1972, a young Jobs graduated high school and enrolled in Reed College – an expensive liberal arts school in Portland. He dropped out after one semester but continued auditing calligraphy classes for the next 18 months. Jobs later said that the beautiful typography he was exposed to at Reed shaped his sense of design and Apple‘s future products.

After dropping out, Jobs bounced around college for 18 months studying philosophy, religion and technology. During this period, Jobs experimented with psychedelic drugs and later said that those experiences helped him think differently.

In 1974, Jobs took up a job as a technician at Atari where he worked with Steve Wozniak. Little did he know this unassuming job would lead him to start the most valuable company in the world just 2 years later.

In 1976, 21-year old Jobs founded Apple Computer with his friend Steve Wozniak in his parents‘ garage. This was just at the dawn of the personal computer revolution.

Wozniak designed and built the Apple I while Jobs devised its marketing and struck business deals. The Apple I was ahead of other machines of the era as it came fully assembled, whereas other PCs required tedious assembly.

Jobs leveraged his now-famous reality distortion field to convince local stores to order the Apple I despite fledgling demand. He fundamentally changed how personal computers were sold – fully assembled to consumers rather than as DIY kits for hobbyists.

The Apple II followed in 1977 and was chosen by VisiCorp to demonstrate the first ever spreadsheet and word processing programs. With color graphics, hi-res animation and an audio card, Apple II sales boomed. By 1978, Apple was making $1 million per month with sales doubling every four months – explosive growth that fueled the PC revolution.

But conflict arose between Jobs and other Apple executives who favored more traditional corporate structure over his creative vision. This resulted in Jobs being forced out of the company he co-founded in 1985 at just 30 years old.

Devastated but undeterred, Jobs sold all but one share of Apple stock and aimed to start over. He founded NeXT Inc. to build advanced educational computers, showing that his ambition could not be thwarted.

During his exile from Apple, Jobs purchased Lucasfilm‘s computer graphics division in 1986 which later became Pixar Animation Studios.

Pixar was languishing until Jobs provided leadership, strategic guidance and additional funding. He recruited John Lasseter who developed technologies allowing crude computer animations to be transformed into feature films beginning with Toy Story in 1995.

Toy Story went on to huge commercial success with over $350 million in box office revenue. This marked Pixar‘s emergence as a powerhouse of computer animation. Jobs had astutely recognized the potential for digital animation years before competitors and guided Pixar into an industry leader.

Jobs negotiated a landmark co-production deal with Disney in 1997 that split costs and profits. This aligned Pixar‘s creative prowess with Disney‘s marketing and distribution muscle. Over the next 15 years, Pixar created an unprecedented streak of hit animated films like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Wall-E.

The Pixar deal made Steve Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney after it purchased Pixar for a colossal $7.4 billion in 2006. This highlights Jobs‘ pivotal role in pioneering modern digital animation.

A decade after being ousted, Apple purchased NeXT for $429 million in late 1996 bringing Jobs back as advisor. He rapidly ascended again as interim CEO.

At the time, Apple was floundering, having failed to launch a next-generation operating system to replace the outdated Mac OS. Jobs axed 70% of products, leaving just 4 to focus on doing less but better. He forged partnerships with Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple.

In 1998, Apple launched the iMac G3, a breakthrough all-in-one computer encased in translucent bondi blue plastic. The stylish iMac sold 800,000 units in under five months, putting Apple back on the map.

This was followed by the Apple Store in 2001. Rather than just selling via retailers, Apple had its own physical stores with personalized service and lustworthy products on display. The stores became shrines that bolstered the brand‘s cachet.

But the biggest disruptions were yet to come under the stewardship of Jobs who led Apple to unprecedented profitability and briefly made it the most valuable traded company in 2011.

In 2001, Apple unveiled the iPod, a pocket-sized device that stored 1,000 songs and synced seamlessly with the iTunes music library. With its scroll wheel and slick design, the iPod became a cultural icon and digital music phenomenon.

Apple sold 380,000 iPods in the first year and 100 million by 2008 through relentless product iterations. Competitors failed to keep pace as each new iPod model set the bar higher on design, storage, size, colors and battery life.

iTunes was the real game changer. As an integrated library synced to the iPod, iTunes allowed seamless music management combined with an online store selling songs for just 99 cents. This innovative model disrupted the entire music industry.

At its peak in 2012, iTunes had over 500 million active users and a catalog of 43 million songs generating billions in revenue. It catalyzed the explosion of digital music.

In 2007, Apple released the iPhone. While not the first smartphone, it leapfrogged the competition through its revolutionary touchscreen interface and sleek industrial design.

The iPhone introduced multi-touch gestures, swipes and pinches to zoom. This capacitive touchscreen replaced plastic styluses used by earlier resistive touchscreen phones. The keyboard was also eliminated, replaced by a responsive on-screen keyboard.

It‘s easy to take the iPhone‘s touch UI for granted today but it was groundbreaking technology in 2007. Combined with mobile web browsing, email, calendar and maps, the iPhone delivered computing power in your pocket.

The App Store launched a year later allowed 3rd party apps, fueling iPhone adoption. By unleashing developer creativity, soon there were hundreds of thousands of apps enhancing the capabilities Jobs had never imagined.

The iPhone was an unprecedented success, igniting the smartphone revolution. Apple has sold over 2.2 billion iPhones to date. The iPhone accounted for over 60% of Apple‘s revenue as recently as 2020, highlighting its importance to Apple‘s meteoric rise.

Next came the iPad in 2010, which made tablet computers mainstream after prior failed attempts by Microsoft and others. The iPad built on the iPhone‘s touch interface but with a larger 9.7 inch display.

By eliminating physical keyboards, the iPad was thinner, lighter and easier to operate than previous tablets. It was also more powerful than smartphones for productivity. The App Store already had thousands of apps ready for the iPad‘s launch.

Apple sold over 300,000 iPads on day one even though the tablet market was non-existent before it. The iPad achieved sales of 100 million units by just 2.5 years after launch – the same timeframe as the iPhone. This established the iPad as Apple‘s third revolutionary product developed under Jobs.

Steve Jobs has been described as a modern day Thomas Edison in the sheer breadth of industries he upended. While he did not engineer the core technologies himself, his genius was understanding what consumers desired before they realized it.

Jobs considered himself an artist just as much as technologist and placed design on par with function. He insisted on excellence down to minute details that consumers would never notice but contributed to the unified user experience.

Some of his guiding design principles were:

Focus – Build excellent products rather than chase profit. Just make the best devices you yourself want to use.

Usability – Products must be intuitive and user-friendly. They should feel natural, even enjoyable, to operate.

Simplicity – Cut out unnecessary complexity. Simplify interfaces to the most essential features.

Elegance – Beauty in both hardware and software. Products should "just work" via smart design.

End-to-End Control – Control over both hardware and software for unified user experience.

Premium Build – Manufacturing with precision and premium materials. Details and fit-and-finish matter.

Secrecy – Shroud products in secrecy to fuel anticipation and prevent copying.

Jobs was thus equally skilled at understanding human desires as the technology itself. He played the critical role of guiding the design and user experience decisions that made Apple‘s beautiful products instantly compelling.

While this account has focused on Job‘s monumental achievements, he was also a complex man with many flaws as most geniuses are.

Jobs valued his privacy and little is known about his personal life. But his mercurial personality and management style have been widely documented.

Profiles describe a man possessed of massive ego, an abrasive attitude, and little tolerance for underperformance. Though he could inspire with charisma, his criticism was often scathing which fostered a culture of fear at Apple.

Engineers working under him endured impossible deadlines and perfectionistic demands because they wanted to please him.

In business dealings though, Jobs leveraged his aura of genius to gain concessions from partners, suppliers and even rivals.

His perseverance was forged through setbacks like being forced out of his own company and multiple health problems. Jobs battled cancer and other illnesses for years before his death in 2011 at just 56 years old.

The story of Steve Jobs illustrates that innovation requires both vision to see future possibilities and the force of will to manifest them into reality. While he left behind a complex legacy, Jobs changed our relationship with technology and ushered in the personal computing age we now take for granted.

Related posts:

  • Who is Ben Horowitz, Silicon Valley‘s Billionaire Rainmaker?
  • Everything You Need to Know About the Apple II
  • Who is Reed Hastings, The Billionaire Founder of Netflix and Media Mogul?
  • Alan Turing — Complete Biography, History and Inventions
  • Charles Labofish
  • 6 Reasons to Avoid an Apple Watch SE Today
  • Elizur Wright: The Father of Life Insurance Reform
  • 14 Reasons to Avoid a Fitbit Charge 5 at All Costs

Join the conversation Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

  • Skip to main content
  • Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

NPR's Book of the Day

  • LISTEN & FOLLOW
  • Apple Podcasts
  • Google Podcasts
  • Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

Steve Jobs: The Story Of The Man Behind The Personal Computer

The Apple founder spoke with Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1996. Later, after he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs asked Walter Isaacson to write his biography. Isaacson spoke to Fresh Air Oct. 25, 2011.

Hear The Original Interview

Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple

Author Interviews

Jobs' biography: thoughts on life, death and apple.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. The movie "Steve Jobs," with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin based on the best-selling biography by Walter Isaacson, opens today in New York and LA. Today on FRESH AIR, we'll listen back to Terry's 2011 interview with Isaacson and hear what our film critic, David Edelstein, thinks of the film. But let's start with an excerpt of an interview Terry recorded with Steve Jobs himself. They spoke in 1996.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

From what I've read, it sounds like you were really the advocate for having a mouse on the Mac. Why did you push for that and what was the argument against it?

STEVE JOBS: Well, as I mentioned earlier, I went to Xerox PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, in 1979 and I saw the early work on graphical user interfaces that they had done. And they had a mouse, and it was obvious that you needed a pointing device and a mouse seemed to be the best one. We tried a bunch of other ones subsequently at Apple and a mouse indeed was the best one. We refined it a little bit.

We found that, you know, Xerox's had three buttons. We found that people would push the wrong button or be scared that they were going to push the wrong button, so they always looked at the mouse instead of the screen. So we got it down to one button so that you could never push the wrong button, made some refinements like that.

The Xerox, you know, mouse cost about $1,000 a piece to build. We had to engineer one that cost 20 bucks to build. So we had to do a lot of those kinds of things. But the basic concept of the mouse came originally from a company called SRI, through Xerox and then to Apple. And there were a lot of people at Apple that just didn't get it. We fought tooth and nail with a variety of people there who thought the whole concept of a graphical user interface was crazy, but fortunate...

GROSS: On what grounds?

JOBS: On the grounds that it either couldn't be done, or on the grounds that real computer users didn't need, you know, menus in plain English, and real computer users didn't care about, you know, putting nice little pictures on the screen. But fortunately, I was the largest stockholder and the chairman of the company, so I won.

BIANCULLI: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs speaking to Terry Gross in 1996. Jobs died in 2011, the same year our next guest, Walter Isaacson, released an authorized biography titled "Steve Jobs." That's also the name of the movie about him opening today in New York and LA. Isaacson describes Jobs as the greatest business executive of our era, having revolutionized six industries - personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computers and digital publishing. You could even add a seventh - retailing. Jobs chose an esteemed biographer to write his story. Isaacson is the author of biographies of Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger. This interview was recorded in 2011.

GROSS: Walter Isaacson, welcome to FRESH AIR. Steve Jobs wasn't the inventor of a lot of the products that he's known for. He didn't literally design them. Would you explain exactly what his role was in creating things like the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone? Choose one example.

WALTER ISAACSON: Steve Jobs didn't invent anything outright, but he invented the future by putting together remarkable inventions and ideas. For example, he walks into Xerox PARC in the 1980s, early 1980s, and sees this graphical user interface that Xerox had created. Xerox didn't know what to do with it, but instead of having...

GROSS: Explain what a graphical user interface is.

ISAACSON: Instead of having those little, awful C-prompts that you and I remember of a green line on sort of a black screen, and you have to do command-execute, that sort of thing, you have what we see today on all computer screens, which is icons and folders and documents. And you use a mouse and you click on them.

All of that was invented at Xerox PARC, but Xerox ended up producing a computer that was totally worthless with it, and Steve Jobs made an arrangement with Xerox. They invested in Apple. And he went and he took that concept, and he improved it a hundredfold.

He made it so that you could drag and drop some of the folders, and you could do all the double-clicking. He invented the pull-down menus, along with this Macintosh team he had in the early 1980s. So what he was able to do was to take a conception and turn it into reality. And that's where the genius was, was connecting art with technology.

GROSS: He even got involved with colors and, you know, with how the computer physically looked, what color it was. One person he worked with complained that there were 2,000 shades of beige that were available, but Steve Jobs wanted to create his own because the other 2,000 shades of beige weren't good enough. I think this was for the Apple II.

ISAACSON: This is, yeah, one of the original computers they did. And he just obsessed over the color, the color of the screws, the finish of the screws, even the screws you couldn't see.

His father taught him, when he was a young kid and they were building a fence or a cabinet, he would say even the parts unseen should be beautiful because although nobody else will know, you will know whether or not you used great craftsmanship.

And so even with the original Macintosh, he makes sure that the circuit board, that all of the chips are lined up properly and look good. He made them go back and redo the circuit board. He made them find the right color, have the right curves on the screw, and even the sort of curves on the machine, he wanted it to feel friendly.

The original Macintosh, he wanted it to look like a human face but not a Neanderthal face. So he made the top a little bit narrower. And if you remember the old Macintosh, it does look like something friendly, something smiling at you.

GROSS: So did this obsessiveness drive his team crazy?

ISAACSON: It drove them crazy, but they became very loyal. It's one of the dichotomies about Jobs is he could be demanding and tough - at times, you know, really berating people and being irate. On the other hand, he got all A-players, and they became fanatically loyal to him. Why? Because they realized they were producing with other A-players truly great products for an artist who was a perfectionist and frankly wasn't always the kindest person when they failed. But they knew that, you know, he was rallying them to do good stuff.

GROSS: You say that starting in 1981, the Mac team gave out an award to someone on the team who best stood up to Steve Jobs.

ISAACSON: Absolutely, and this is typical of Jobs is that he could push people, but he loved to be pushed back. He loved to get into arguments. And so the first year, it was won by Joanna Hoffman, a woman who's from a Central European background. And, you know, she would always just tell Steve no.

At one point, she goes storming up the stairs and tells everybody I'm going to just stab him because he's, you know, making up projections that will never work. And she won it again the second year. But the third year, this new woman, Debbie Coleman, decided she was going to try to win the award, and she did.

Steve loved it, and both Joanna Hoffman and Debbie Coleman got themselves promoted. So as tough as he was as a boss, he liked people to be tough under him.

GROSS: Now, why did he want Apple to have its own operating system, one that would only run on Apple products?

ISAACSON: Jobs was an artist. It was like he didn't want his beautiful software to run on somebody else's junky hardware, or vice versa - for somebody else's bad operating system to be running on his hardware. He felt that the end-to-end integration of hardware and software made for the best user experience. And that's one of the divides of the digital age because Microsoft, for example, or Google's Android, they license the operating system to a whole bunch of hardware makers.

But you don't get that pristine user experience that Jobs as a perfectionist wanted if you don't integrate the hardware, the software, the content, the devices, all into one seamless unit.

GROSS: So how did this work for and against Steve Jobs?

ISAACSON: It was not a great business model, at first, to insist that if you wanted the Apple operating system, you had to buy the Apple hardware and vice versa. And Microsoft, which licenses itself promiscuously to all sorts of hardware manufacturers, ends up with 90 to 95 percent of the operating system market, you know, by the beginning of 2000.

But in the long run, the end-to-end integration works very well for Apple and for Steve Jobs because it allows him to create devices that just work beautifully with the machines - for example, the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. They're all seamlessly integrated.

GROSS: My favorite example in the book, I think, of how much of a control freak he was with his products, Steve Jobs is asked by a real, like, Apple fan to autograph an Apple keyboard. And then Jobs insists on removing certain keys that were added to the keyboard during his hiatus from Apple, after he was ousted, before he returned.

So the person who wanted the keyboard autographed had to remove the function keys - the F1, F2, F3, F4 keys - and had to remove the cursor keys. So... (Laughing)

ISAACSON: Steve Jobs was insistent that everything be perfect, and he didn't like cursor keys because he wanted people to use the point-and-click graphical operating system. So he said there should be no cursor keys on the keyboard. After he leaves, they put them on. So when that student asked him to autograph it, Steve himself takes out his car keys and pries off the cursor keys and the function keys that he thinks are superfluous on the keyboard of the Macintoshes that were being built after he left. And he says, I'm improving the world one keyboard at a time.

BIANCULLI: Walter Isaacson, author of the biography "Steve Jobs," speaking to Terry Gross in 2011. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry’s 2011 interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography of Steve Jobs. A new movie based on his book, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, opens today in New York and LA.

GROSS: So let's talk a little bit about Steve Jobs' relationship with Bill Gates; incredible rivals, but early on, they were going to collaborate. What was the nature of the original collaboration?

ISAACSON: Well, Microsoft, founded by Bill Gates, made some of the original software for the Apple II - software called BASIC, which, you know, is sort of an easy programming language. And what Steve Jobs wanted when he was coming up with the idea of this beautiful new Macintosh that would have this almost playroom-like graphical design and interface was to get Microsoft to write word processing software, spreadsheet software, everything for the Macintosh.

So he goes and visits Bill Gates. They have what I call in the book a binary star system relationship, meaning the gravitational pull of the other affects the orbit. So they have interlinked orbits for almost 30 years. So Gates loves the Macintosh, and he goes down and puts a whole team on it, and they create Word and spreadsheets and Excel and others for the Mac and become one of the biggest software developers for the Mac.

One of the things that Jobs then worried about was that Bill Gates and Microsoft would take the idea of a graphical interface and make their own operating system that copied some of the look and the feel because back then, Microsoft was making an operating system that had all these command lines and C-prompts.

And indeed, Bill Gates decides, of course, like any other computer manufacturer, we should go this graphical route, to show - you know, let people point and click at folders and icons on the screen. So he does begin to create Windows, and that drives Steve Jobs to distraction.

He thinks that he's been ripped off by Microsoft. And indeed, even though you can't copyright the look and feel of a computer, I understand Jobs' feelings, which was he had helped create this beautiful interface. And Bill Gates said, well, you broke into Xerox PARC and stole it; we broke in and saw the Xerox machines as well, and - not broke in, but we saw the machines as well. Everybody's going to do graphical interfaces.

So there are really two sides of that story, and I can understand both sides. But it did become a real source of friction where Jobs just simply felt that Bill Gates didn't come up with anything inventive and just sort of took the ideas that the Macintosh had and created Windows.

GROSS: So do Apple and Microsoft continue to work together after Jobs feels so ripped off by Windows?

ISAACSON: Yes, they do, but there are all sorts of lawsuits where Apple’s trying to sue Microsoft for Windows, for stealing the look and feel. Apple loses most of the suits. But they drag on, and there's even a government investigation.

So by the time Steve Jobs comes back to Apple in 1997, the relationship is horrible between Apple and Microsoft. And when we say that Jobs and Gates had a rivalry, we also have to realize they had a collaboration and a partnership. It was typical of the digital age, which is sort of both rivalry and partnership.

And one of the first calls that Steve Jobs makes when he comes back to Apple in 1997 is to Bill Gates, saying come, we have to talk because we have to resolve this problem, and we have to get you making great software for the Macintosh computer again instead of suing each other.

GROSS: And is that what happened?

ISAACSON: Yes. And Apple had been negotiating with Microsoft for months and months with hundreds of pages of some sort of settlement of all their lawsuits. And Jobs just does what he often does, which is focus and simplify. And he says, here's all we need to do - a commitment that you'll make software for the Macintosh, an investment by Microsoft in Apple and let's just resolve everything.

And they do it within a few weeks, just walking around, talking with Gates and one of Gates' top deputies. And they cut through all the clutter and are able - Steve Jobs is able to announce a deal at the end of - in 1997 at MacWorld in Boston.

GROSS: So when Jobs returned to Apple in '97, after he was ousted in '85, Apple was not in very good shape. Did this…

ISAACSON: It was about 90 days away from bankruptcy.

GROSS: So did this pact that Jobs and Gates arrange help save Apple?

ISAACSON: Yes, absolutely, and it gave everybody confidence that there would be new Apple operating systems, that there would always be software for it. And I think that - Bill Gates says in my book they always liked working with Apple and with Steve.I think there was sort of a joy that they could collaborate again.

GROSS: Gates and Jobs are two, like, the two giants of the, you know, computer and software world. How would you compare their approaches to their work and what drove Jobs and what drives Gates?

ISAACSON: Right, they were both born in 1955. They're both college dropouts. But, you know, Steve Jobs dropped out to sort of eventually wander off to India and seek enlightenment and really got into the counterculture, experimented with drugs.

You know, Bill Gates drops out to form a software company. And he was much, you know, sort of more driven and smart when it came to the mental processing power you need to create and code software. Steve Jobs was more intuitive, operated in a much more volatile manner as opposed to sort of the sharp, crisp meetings that Bill Gates would have.

In the end, I think the biggest difference is that Jobs was very much a genius when it came to aesthetics, design, consumer desire. And Bill Gates was a genius when it came to - here's a business model that can work with great operating systems. And he was much more of a focused businessperson than Jobs was.

GROSS: So now, we talked a little bit about Jobs' relationship with Bill Gates. What about his relationship with Google? Like, for example, you say Jobs was really angry when Google started going into the phone business and developed the Droid. Why wouldn't he expect that Google or another company would try to, you know, copy and improve on, if they could, the iPhone?

ISAACSON: I think there was an unnerving historic resonance from what had happened a couple of decades earlier, which is Microsoft takes the graphical operating system of the Mac and starts licensing it around. Suddenly you have Google taking the operating system of the iPhone and mobile devices and all the touchscreen technology and look and feel and building upon it and making it an open technology that various device-makers could use.

So it was the same type of thing that had happened earlier, and Steve Jobs felt very possessive about all of the look, the feel, the swipes, the multi-touch, you know, gestures that you use and was driven to absolute distraction when Android's operating system, developed by Google, used by many hardware manufacturers, started doing the exact same thing.

Would you expect that to happen? Yeah. That's the way things happen in this world. But it also - would you expect Jobs to be furious about it? He was furious. In fact, that probably understates his feeling. He was really furious. And he let Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, know it. They had even a breakfast - coffee at one point in which Jobs says, I'm not interested in just your money. I want you to stop ripping us off.

GROSS: Let's talk a little bit more personally about Steve Jobs' life. When he was I guess in his 20s, that's when he started being interested in Zen Buddhism. He spent time in India. So he was really interested in the Buddhist view of life. Yet, you say he was driven by demons. What do you think some of those demons were?

ISAACSON: I think that he felt slightly apart from the world because of his adoption - being adopted, meaning he was part of the world he lived in but also separate from it. He felt somewhat chosen because his adoptive parents, when he said whoa, the girl across - when he was 6 years old, the girl across the street from him said, oh, you're adopted; that means your parents abandoned you and didn't want you.

So he runs in to see his adoptive parents, the people he considers his real parents, and they say, no, no, no, you're special. We specially picked you out. You were chosen by us. And that helps give him a sense of being special and chosen.

So I think everybody's driven to some extent by, you know, the things in their background. But for Steve Jobs, it was particularly intense, and he felt throughout his life, he told me that he was on a journey. And he said, the journey is the reward. That was one of the Zen, you know, phrases that he loved to repeat. But that journey involved resolving some of the conflicts about his role in this world, why he was here, you know, what it was all about.

BIANCULLI: Walter Isaacson, author of "Steve Jobs," speaking to Terry Gross in 2011. His book is the basis of the film "Steve Jobs," which opens today in New York and LA. We'll hear more of their conversation and another excerpt from Terry's 1996 interview with Steve Jobs himself after a break. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross. Back with more of Terry's 2011 interview with Walter Isaacson. He’s the author of the best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, the book on which screenwriter Aaron Sorkin based his screenplay of the new movie, also called "Steve Jobs." The film opens today in New York and LA. Walter Isaacson, in addition to chronicling how Jobs revolutionized personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computers and digital publishing, also wrote about Jobs’ personal story. When we left off, Isaacson was describing how being adopted left Jobs feeling abandoned by his birth parents and chosen by his adoptive parents.

GROSS: Who were his biological parents, and why did they give them up?

ISAACSON: His biological parents were a Syrian graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin, a guy named Abdul Fattah Jandali, who had come over from Homs, Syria, and ended up in a relationship with another graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Joanne Schieble, and she got pregnant. They went to Syria together, actually, during the summer, and she comes back pregnant. She's from a very tight-knit Catholic community near Green Bay - or in Green Bay, Wis. And so she goes out, doesn't - they can't get married. Her father is a strict Catholic, and he's dying. So she decides...

GROSS: He threatens to disown her if they get married.

ISAACSON: Yes. He also felt that way about previous boyfriends who weren't Catholic, so I don't think it had anything to do with being Syrian, necessarily. It was just that he was a strict father who was, you know, very upset when his daughter was having relationships, especially with people who weren't part of the Catholic community. She goes out, then, to San Francisco and finds a kindly doctor whose job it was to take unwed pregnant women under wing and help them give birth and then help arrange for private adoptions.

GROSS: So she insisted that the adoptive parents of her baby be college graduates.

ISAACSON: That was the one stipulation she made. Both she and the father of the child, you know, believe very much in education. And in the end, they at first put - the baby, Steve Jobs, is given to a lawyer and his wife. Actually, both of them, I think, are lawyers. But for reasons that are slightly unclear - Steve said it's because they wanted a girl. Whatever it may have been, Steve is taken out of that family and instead is adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. And he never went to college, in fact, dropped out of high school. He was a repo man, a guy who repossessed cars, you know, for a finance company, been in the Coast Guard. His wife was a, you know, daughter of Armenian refugees. And so when Steve got placed with that family, his biological mother balked at first at signing the adoption papers, but finally did so when the Jobs family made a pledge that they would start a college fund and make sure that Steve went to college.

GROSS: So there's a really interesting story about Steve Jobs finding out who his biological parents are. First, he finds out about his mother. How does he find that out?

ISAACSON: He writes - he wants to find who his biological mother is in the mid-1980s, and he discovers on his birth certificate that there's the name of this doctor. He calls the doctor up in San Francisco. This is the one who had sheltered Joanne Schieble when she was having the child and says I'd like to know who my biological mother is. And the doctor says, I'm sorry, all my records were destroyed in a fire. I can't tell you who that is.

The doctor actually wasn't telling the truth. And that night, the doctor writes a letter, says to Steve Jobs, to be delivered upon my death. And it says who his biological mother is. In one of those coincidences of Steve's life, the doctor dies pretty soon thereafter. And Steve Jobs gets this letter. It says the name of his mother. His mother is then living. He finds a detective. They find that she's now living in Los Angeles. And he contacts her through the detective, the lawyer, and then meets her. And she is very loving and also explains sort of tearfully that she didn't really want to give him up. And he says don't worry, everything turned out OK. I just want to thank you.

GROSS: And then how does he find out who his father is, his biological father?

ISAACSON: So his biological mother says there's something I have to tell you, which is you have a sister, a sister that I didn't put up for adoption, born a year - two - a couple years later. And the sister is Mona Simpson, now an incredibly famous and great novelist, then a struggling and aspiring novelist working for George Plimpton's magazine, The Paris Review, in New York.

GROSS: And her best-known book is called "Anywhere But Here."

ISAACSON: Which, "Anywhere but Here" describes sort of the wandering track of her and her mother, Joanne Schieble, the - Steve's mother, biological mother, as they travel across the country from Wisconsin and eventually end up in Los Angeles. And the mother, shall we say, is delightful but very, very quirky. So it should not surprise you to know that the mother - and the mother gets a lawyer involved - contacts Mona to say you have a brother. But instead of saying your brother is Steve Jobs who used to be at Apple Computers, just left Apple and is, you know, a famous and rich person, simply says, you have a brother. And I'm not going to tell you who he is, but he's famous. He's rich. He used to be poor. He has dark hair, whatever.

And so at The Paris Review, for the next few days, they're all trying to guess who this lost brother of Mona Simpson is. And they finally decide it's John Travolta, probably. That was sort of the most popular of guesses. But Joanne Schieble arrives in New York. They, I think, go to the St. Regis Hotel. Steve Jobs is introduced to Mona Simpson, and they bond totally for the rest of their lives because, as Steve often says, it was just a pleasure to find that I had a sister who was also an artist.

GROSS: At this point, he can find out who his father is - biological father. And it turns out it's somebody who he already had some connection to. So tell us who - what that connection was between Steve Jobs and his biological father.

ISAACSON: It's one of the astonishing sort of coincidences of Steve's magical life, which is Mona Simpson, the sister, helps track down the lost father, Jandali, the Syrian graduate student, and finds that he's running a coffee shop in Sacramento, Calif. And so tells Steve - Mona goes to meet and find Jandali at the coffee shop. And Steve says don't even tell him about me because Steve doesn't really want to meet him. He feels, you know, the guy abandoned Mona, abandoned him. There's no reason to meet him.

So Mona goes to the coffee shop and Jandali gets, I think, probably rather emotional. They talk for a long time. He says that they had had another child, but we’ll never hear from him again. And Mona's kind of aghast and doesn't say anything. And then Jandali says I used to run a really great restaurant, you know, near Cupertino. I wish you could have seen me then. Everybody used to come to that restaurant, even Steve Jobs used to come to the restaurant. Mona, of course, looks shocked and doesn't say well, Steve Jobs is your son. And Jandali looked at her and says oh, yes, Steve Jobs. He was a good tipper.

But Mona never says to Jandali Steve Jobs is your son. But she goes back, reports this conversation to her brother, Steve. And Steve says oh, yeah. The guy who ran that restaurant, I remember him. He was a fat, balding Syrian guy. And Steve decides - you know, he had met him a couple of times, I think shook his hand at the restaurant. And Steve decides, no, I don't ever see that guy again and doesn't.

GROSS: So he never meets him. I mean, he met him before, but he never meets him as his son.

ISAACSON: No. Never after that meets him.

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2011 interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography of and titled "Steve Jobs." A new movie based on his book, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, opens today in New York and LA.

GROSS: Steve Jobs didn't ask to have any control over the biography you were writing of him. He didn't even want to read the manuscript before it was published. But when he saw the cover, he wanted to change it. What was the original cover? What didn't he like about it?

ISAACSON: The original cover put in the catalog, or an early database, had sort of an Apple logo with a young picture of Steve. And it was kind of slightly gimmicky. And it had a title, "iSteve," that was definitely gimmicky, that both my daughter, my wife, a lot of friends said, oh, that's far too gimmicky.

And it was one of the times he got really angry at me. He said, well, I'm not going to cooperate anymore because - and there were some words I can't use on the air. He said, you know, this stinks, but he said it in stronger language. And then he said, you know, I will keep working with you and giving you interviews but only if you let me have some input and, you know, into the design of the cover. It took me about one or two seconds to think, wow, that's a great offer. Here's a guy with the best design taste I've ever met.

GROSS: (Laughter).

ISAACSON: So I said, great. Sure. And it's the only thing he focused on. I think he kind of believes nobody's really going to read the book, but they are going to see the cover. And he felt that people - he told me. He said, people will somehow think I've been involved with the cover of this book and the design of it because they know my passions in that field, so I have to be. And so I said, sure. And I put it in the book itself, in the introduction, just so everybody knows, you know, that was an involvement of his in this book.

GROSS: So did he choose the photograph?

ISAACSON: We spent a lot of time on the photographs that - it was the photograph I wanted. It's a wonderful Albert Watson photograph taken in - you know, for Fortune magazine in 2009, I think, or it appeared then. I think there were four or five photographs. That's the one I strongly preferred, along with the one on the back, which is a Norman Seeff portrait taken for Rolling Stone, in January of '84 it ran, and him holding the Mac.

That got juggled quite a bit, but he finally approved and said, yeah, OK. Those are the two best pictures. And he also suggested it be in black-and-white, that it be a shiny, glossy cover - I mean, that there'd be a high-quality paper and stark whiteness and a good gloss coating on the cover. So those were the inputs he had on the cover, but he never asked to read the book. But I never quite understood why his legendary desire for control did not extend to wanting to control the book. And when I'd ask him, he'd say, well, it's better if it's an independent book. That's probably better in terms of establishing the credibility of the book.

GROSS: So when you use your Mac or iPhone or iPod, iPad - I imagine you have that stuff, especially since you've been writing about Jobs - what do you see differently about your computer or your devices because you've talked to Steve Jobs so many times, because you got to know him so well?

ISAACSON: I see the depth of the simplicity. I see the fact that when I go on an interface on a different machine, one that's not an Apple machine, I might have to hit a button that says start in order to shut down a machine. And I think that's not intuitive. But if I'm looking at the interface on my iPhone and I don't quite know how to do something, I'll touch what I think intuitively is probably the way to do it on the menu, and boom, magically, it always - or often seems to work. So that intuitive nature of the design and how he would repeatedly sit there with his design engineers and his interface software people and say no, no, no. I want to make it simpler. I want to make it easier. I've appreciated that.

And I also appreciate the beauty of the parts unseen. As I said before, his father taught him that the back of the fence, the back of a chest of drawers should be as beautiful as the front because you will know the craftsmanship that went into it. And so somehow, it comes through the depth of the beauty of the design when I'm, you know, using my iPad, for example.

GROSS: Well, Walter Isaacson, thank you so much for talking with us about Steve Jobs. It's been really interesting, and I really appreciate it.

ISAACSON: I appreciate being on with you, Terry.

BIANCULLI: Walter Isaacson speaking to Terry Gross in 2011. His biography of Steve Jobs is the basis of a new movie, opening today in New York in LA, also called "Steve Jobs."

And now let's hear a little more of Terry's 1996 interview with Steve Jobs himself.

GROSS: What do you think the state of the computer would be if it weren't for Apple? This is a chance, I guess, for a really self-serving answer. But, I mean, I'm really curious what you think.

JOBS: I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers.

GROSS: Yeah, explain what you mean by that.

JOBS: You know, if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring not only ease of use to people so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time. But it was to bring, you know, beautiful fonts and typography to people. It was to bring graphics to people, not for, you know, plotting laminar flow calculations but so that they could see beautiful photographs or pictures or artwork. Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been, you know, a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience. That's the seed of Apple - you know, computers for the rest of us. And I think the sort of - the liberal arts point of view still lives at Apple. I'm not so sure that it lives that many other places. I mean, one of the reasons I think Microsoft took 10 years to copy the Mac was 'cause they didn't really get it at its core.

GROSS: What was the very first computer you had?

JOBS: I was very lucky. I was born in San Francisco, and I grew up in Silicon Valley. And I was able to go to NASA AMES Research Center nearby and play with the timesharing computer, which was a – you know, a loud mechanical terminal hooked up with a wire somewhere. And there was supposedly a computer on the other end of it. And I got a chance to, you know, program in FORTRAN and BASIC and . . .

GROSS: Those are the computer languages of the time.

JOBS: The computer languages of the time. And I was captured by it.

GROSS: How did you get into the business? What made you think this is going to be my life?

JOBS: I met my future partner in Apple, Steve Wozniak, when I was about - oh, I guess about 13 years old. He was the first person I met that knew more about electronics and computers than I did at the time. And we became fast friends and started to build electronic devices together. We built blue boxes together for a while, which were little devices that could allow you to make free phone calls everywhere - illegally, I might add. And . . .

GROSS: Oh, so you were a hacker.

JOBS: Yeah. Yeah. We built the first digital blue box in the whole world. It was wonderful. We had – our tagline, which – we put a little card on the bottom of each one - was he's got the whole world in his hands.

JOBS: And the reason we built a computer was that we wanted one, and we couldn’t afford one. We couldn’t afford to buy one. They were thousands of dollars at that time. We were just two teenagers. So we started trying to build them, you know, scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we could. And after a few attempts, we managed to put together something that was the Apple I, and all of our friends wanted them, too. They wanted to build them. So it turned out that it took maybe 50 hours to build one of these things by hand, and it was taking up all of our spare time because our friends were not that skilled at building them, so Woz and I were building them for them. And we thought, you know, if we could just get what’s called a printed circuit board, where you could just kind of plug in the parts instead of having to hand-wire the whole thing, we could cut the assembly time down from, you know, maybe 50 hours to more like, you know, an hour. And so Woz sold his HP calculator and I sold my VW Microbus, and we got enough money together to pay someone to design one of these printed circuit boards for us. And our goal was to just sell them as raw printed circuit boards to our friends and make enough money to recoup our calculator and transportation.

And what happened was that one of the early computers - in fact, the first computer store in the world, which was in Mountain View at the time, said well, I'll take 50 of these computers, but I want them fully assembled, which was a twist that we’d never thought of. So we went and bought the parts to build 100 computers, and we built 50 of them and delivered them. And then we got paid in cash and ran back and paid the people that sold us parts for the parts.

And we had - then we had the classic Marxian profit realization crisis, which was our profit wasn't liquid. It was in 50 computers sitting on the floor. So we decided we had to start learning about sales and distribution so that we could sell the 50 computers and get back our money. And that's how we got into business.

And we took our idea to a few companies, one where Woz worked and one where I worked at the time. And neither one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our own company.

BIANCULLI: That was Steve Jobs in an interview with Terry Gross, recorded in 1996. He died in 2011. A new movie about him called "Steve Jobs" opens today in New York and LA. Next up, film critic David Edelstein will review that movie. This is FRESH AIR.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Why It Matters Who Steve Jobs Really Was

Apple Unveils iPad 2

I n 2011 Walter Isaacson published a biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Isaacson’s biography was fully authorized by its subject: Jobs handpicked Isaacson, who had written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. Entitled simply Steve Jobs , the book was well-reviewed and sold some 3 million copies.

But now its account is being challenged by another book, this one called Becoming Steve Jobs , by Brent Schlender , a veteran technology journalist who was friendly with Jobs, and Rick Tetzeli , executive editor at Fast Company . Some of Jobs’ former colleagues and friends have taken sides, speaking out against the old book and praising the new one. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO and Jobs’s successor, has said that Isaacson’s book depicts Jobs as “a greedy, selfish egomaniac.” Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief, has weighed in against it , and Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of software and Internet services, tweeted about the new book : “Well done and first to get it right.”

But who did get it right? And why do people care so much anyway?

(This article comes with a bouquet of disclosures, starting with the fact that Isaacson is a current contributor and former editor of TIME magazine and as such my former boss. I’m quoted in his biography—I interviewed Jobs half a dozen times in the mid-2000s, though he and I weren’t friendly. Schlender spent more than 20 years writing for Fortune , which is owned by TIME’s parent company, Time Inc., and Tetzeli was an editor both at Fortune and at Entertainment Weekly , also a Time Inc. magazine.)

Schlender and Tetzeli have given their book the subtitle “The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader,” and its emphasis is on the transformation that Jobs underwent between 1985, when he was ousted from Apple, and 1997, when he returned to it. “The most basic question about Steve’s career is this,” they write. “How could the man who had been such an inconsistent, inconsiderate, rash, and wrongheaded businessman … become the venerated CEO who revived Apple and created a whole new set of culture-defining products?” It’s an excellent question.

11 Amazing Features of the Apple Watch

File picture shows an Apple Watch during an Apple event at the Flint Center in Cupertino

Becoming Steve Jobs is, like most books about Jobs, tough on his early years. He could be a callous person (he initially denied being the father of his first child) and a terrible manager (the original Macintosh, while magnificent in its conception, was only barely viable as a product). On this score Schlender and Tetzeli are clear and even-handed. It’s easy to forget that Jobs originally wanted Pixar, the animation firm he took over from George Lucas in 1986, to focus on selling its graphics technology rather than making movies, and if the geniuses there hadn’t been more independent he might have run it into the ground.

Schlender and Tetzeli argue that it was this middle period that made Jobs. The failure of his first post-Apple company, NeXT, chastened him; his work with Pixar’s Ed Catmull and John Lasseter taught him patience and management skills; and his marriage to Laurene Powell Jobs deepened him emotionally. In those wilderness years he learned discipline and (some) humility and how to iterate and improve a project gradually. Thus reforged, he returned to Apple and led it back from near bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world.

Schlender and Tetzeli strenuously insist that they’re upending the “common myths” about Jobs. But they’re not specific about who exactly believes these myths, and in fact it’s a bit of a straw man: there’s not much in Becoming Steve Jobs that Isaacson or anybody else would disagree with . What’s missing is more problematic: as it goes on, Becoming Steve Jobs gradually abandons its critical distance and becomes a paean to the greatness of Jobs and Apple. Jobs was “someone who preferred creating machines that delighted real people,” and his reborn Apple was “a company that could once again make insanely great computing machines for you and me.” It reprints the famous “ Think Different ” spiel in full. It compares Jobs’ career arc, without irony, to that of Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story . It unspools sentences like: “Steve [we’re on a first-name basis with him] also understood that the personal satisfaction of accomplishing something insanely great was the best motivation of all for a group as talented as his.”

Read More: Apple’s Watch Will Make People and Computers More Intimate

It’s easy to see why Apple executives have endorsed Becoming Steve Jobs , but it has imperfections that would have irked Jobs himself. The writing is slack—it’s larded with clichés (“he wanted to play their game, but by his own rules”) and marred by small infelicities (it confuses jibe and gibe, twice). It lacks detail: for example, it covers Jobs’ courtship of and marriage to Laurene in two dry pages (“Their relationship burned intensely from the beginning, as you might expect from the pairing of two such strong-willed individuals”). By contrast, a Fortune interview Schlender did with Jobs and Bill Gates in 1991 gets 13 pages. Whatever its faults, Isaacson’s book at least dug up the telling details: in his account of the marriage we learn that Jobs was still agonizing over an ex-girlfriend; that he had a hilariously abortive bachelor party; that he threw out the calligrapher who was hired to do the wedding invitations (“I can’t look at her stuff. It’s shit”); and that the vegan wedding cake was borderline inedible.

Jobs was famously unintrospective, but Schlender and Tetzeli seem almost as incurious about his inner life as he supposedly was. Jobs’ birth parents were 23 when they conceived him, then they gave him up for adoption; when he was 23 Jobs abandoned his own first child. It takes a determinedly uninterested biographer not to connect those dots, or at least explain why they shouldn’t be connected. We hear a lot about what Jobs did, and some about how he did it, but very little about why.

Jobs was a man of towering contradictions: he identified deeply with the counterculture but spent his life in corporate boardrooms amassing billions; he made beautiful products that ostensibly enabled individual creativity but in their architecture expressed a deep-seated need for central control. Maybe making educated guesses about a major figure’s private life is unseemly, or quixotic, but that’s the game a biographer is in. Ultimately there’s no point in comparing Steve Jobs and Becoming Steve Jobs , because the latter book isn’t really a biography at all, much less a definitive one.

A more interesting question might be, why has the story of Steve Jobs become so important to us? And why is it such contested territory? He’s also the subject of a scathing new documentary by Alex Gibney and an upcoming biopic written by Aaron Sorkin. Was Jobs, to use Schlender and Tetzeli’s terminology, an asshole, or a genius, or some mysterious fusion of the two? It’s as if Jobs’ life has become a kind of totem, a symbolic story through which we’re trying to understand and work through our own ambivalence about the technology he and his colleagues made, which has so thoroughly invaded and transformed our lives in the past 20 years, for good and/or ill. Apple’s products are so glossy and beautiful and impenetrable that it’s difficult to do anything but admire them. But about Jobs, at least, we can think ­different.

Read next: Becoming Steve Jobs Shares Jobs’ Human Side

Listen to the most important stories of the day.

More Must-Reads From TIME

  • The Fight to Free Evan Gershkovich
  • Meet the 2024 Women of the Year
  • John Kerry's Next Move
  • What the Oscars Say About Film's Future
  • The Quiet Work Trees Do for the Planet
  • Breaker Sunny Choi Is Heading to Paris
  • Column: The Internet Made Romantic Betrayal Even More Devastating
  • Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

You May Also Like

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Tweaker

who's steve jobs biography

By Malcolm Gladwell

An illustration of Steve Jobs reaching for an illuminated light bulb

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”

It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”

Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M. , that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:

Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC , after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.” The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for others’ ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one.’ And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea.”

Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”

“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.” “I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.” Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated. When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”

I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

The famous Apple “Think Different” campaign came from Jobs’s advertising team at TBWAChiatDay. But it was Jobs who agonized over the slogan until it was right:

They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same , it’s think different . Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

The point of Meisenzahl and Mokyr’s argument is that this sort of tweaking is essential to progress. James Watt invented the modern steam engine, doubling the efficiency of the engines that had come before. But when the tweakers took over the efficiency of the steam engine swiftly quadrupled . Samuel Crompton was responsible for what Meisenzahl and Mokyr call “arguably the most productive invention” of the industrial revolution. But the key moment, in the history of the mule, came a few years later, when there was a strike of cotton workers. The mill owners were looking for a way to replace the workers with unskilled labor, and needed an automatic mule, which did not need to be controlled by the spinner. Who solved the problem? Not Crompton, an unambitious man who regretted only that public interest would not leave him to his seclusion, so that he might “earn undisturbed the fruits of his ingenuity and perseverance.” It was the tweaker’s tweaker, Richard Roberts, who saved the day, producing a prototype, in 1825, and then an even better solution in 1830. Before long, the number of spindles on a typical mule jumped from four hundred to a thousand. The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.

Jobs’s friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, had a private jet, and he designed its interior with a great deal of care. One day, Jobs decided that he wanted a private jet, too. He studied what Ellison had done. Then he set about to reproduce his friend’s design in its entirety—the same jet, the same reconfiguration, the same doors between the cabins. Actually, not in its entirety . Ellison’s jet “had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs insisted that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished stainless steel of the buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones.” Having hired Ellison’s designer, “pretty soon he was driving her crazy.” Of course he was. The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection. “I look at his airplane and mine,” Ellison says, “and everything he changed was better.”

The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone. He decided to sue. As he tells Isaacson:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”

Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them. But he did not like it when the same thing was done to him. In his mind, what he did was special. Jobs persuaded the head of Pepsi-Cola, John Sculley, to join Apple as C.E.O., in 1983, by asking him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” When Jobs approached Isaacson to write his biography, Isaacson first thought (“half jokingly”) that Jobs had noticed that his two previous books were on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and that he “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” The architecture of Apple software was always closed. Jobs did not want the iPhone and the iPod and the iPad to be opened up and fiddled with, because in his eyes they were perfect. The greatest tweaker of his generation did not care to be tweaked.

Perhaps this is why Bill Gates—of all Jobs’s contemporaries—gave him fits. Gates resisted the romance of perfectionism. Time and again, Isaacson repeatedly asks Jobs about Gates and Jobs cannot resist the gratuitous dig. “Bill is basically unimaginative,” Jobs tells Isaacson, “and has never invented anything, which I think is why he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

After close to six hundred pages, the reader will recognize this as vintage Jobs: equal parts insightful, vicious, and delusional. It’s true that Gates is now more interested in trying to eradicate malaria than in overseeing the next iteration of Word. But this is not evidence of a lack of imagination. Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.

As his life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. “Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,” Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores. “There would not be a straight piece of glass in the building,” Isaacson writes. “All would be curved and seamlessly joined. . . . The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome.” The architects wanted the windows to open. Jobs said no. He “had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. ‘That would just allow people to screw things up.’ ” ♦

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Our Own Devices

By Jill Lepore

Invention Factory

By Malcolm Ross

Thinking About A.I. with Stanisław Lem

By Rivka Galchen

Vaclav Smil and the Value of Doubt

By David Owen

  • Book Review

Book review: 'Steve Jobs' by Walter Isaacson

Review of walter isaacson's biography of steve jobs.

By Laura June

Share this story

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson’s biography of  Steve Jobs  is in some ways another product created from the mind of its subject. Though Jobs was insistent that he wouldn’t interfere with the writing of the book (and in fact he seems not to have read any part of it), he hand-picked Isaacson to lay down his legacy for all to see. Why he chose him is not surprising: Isaacson’s biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein are engrossing, epic, and readable studies of men who changed history. That Steve Jobs saw himself in this light (and such august company) is neither shocking nor unjustified. And while Isaacson never shies away from Jobs’s often vitriolic temper (and indeed he sometimes seems to dwell on it to make his point), it is clear that in some respects, Steve Jobs is a book told through the often discussed "reality distortion field" of Steve Jobs himself: though other opinions or sides to a story are presented, Steve always has the last, blunt word.

Given the unprecedented access to Jobs and his blessing to interview those close to him presents the reader with a vast and exceedingly complex — but also incredibly consistent — portrait of the man who created Apple and some of the most important technology products of this century. In many ways, the Jobs of the early ’80s at the outset of his breathtaking career is the same feisty and impetuous man we find at the end of the book, picking apart his plans to build a yacht that he knew he would likely never see to completion. Jobs, at least according to this tale, didn’t evolve so much as he forced the world around him to do so. Isaacson’s mastery of the form is evident throughout, and he weaves the tale of Jobs’s life deftly.

For technology enthusiasts and those who followed Steve Jobs’s life as though he were Bob Dylan, the biography reinforces the previously known timeline. Jobs’s own admission early in the process with Isaacson that he didn’t "have any skeletons" in his "closet that can’t be allowed out" is largely true (Isaacson, xx). There are no shocking revelations, but the nuance brought to the events by the wide array of characters Isaacson spent time with, and Jobs’s candid and original perspective, never fail to bring well-known events into sharp and personal focus. One example which was well-documented in the media at the time and which gets several pages of attention in the book is the issue of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems. The story, as told in the book, is significant for a few reasons. First, the book reveals that the band of steel around the edge of the phone was never a big hit with Apple’s engineers, who warned that it could cause reception problems. But Apple’s SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs, living deep in the "reality distortion field" which is repeatedly referred to in the book (and which Jobs’s wife more strikingly terms "magical thinking") insisted that the engineers could figure out how to make it work, to the point that they (Ive and Jobs) even resisted putting a clear coating of varnish on the band to make problems less likely. Secondly, when problems did, in fact, arise, the book makes clear how personally Jobs took the entire situation, going so far as to adamantly suggest that Apple simply ignore the issue, because in his mind, there was no problem, saying, "Fuck this, it’s not worth it" (Isaacson, 521). Only when Tim Cook implored him to face facts did Jobs decide to hold a press conference and offer solutions.

Likewise, it is almost amusing and even a bit sad to read of Jobs’s depression and anger on the evening following the debut of the iPad. Isaacson was by then, somewhat embedded in the Jobs household, and he notes that "as we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone." Jobs told him, "I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, ‘Fuck you, how can you do that?’ I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, ‘Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.’ And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit" (Isaacon, 495). In this and every previous or future launch, Jobs took the products, and their reception, very personally. In every phase of development, from inception to advertisements, he was a dictator, and, as the book underlines quite clearly, people who reacted badly or were underwhelmed simply didn’t get it. The book is rife with such personal perspectives of what are hallowed occurrences in the timeline of Jobs and Apple.

Jobs’s many achievements are tallied in detail, and while they are well known — the Macintosh, Pixar, the iMac, the iPhone, the iPad — it has only been previously assumed that Jobs was closely involved. Now all of his interactions with Apple’s products are truly exposed, in great, painstaking detail. That Jobs was exhaustively involved from beginning to end in the creation of these products and companies — even during the years in which he was gravely ill — is a testament to his work ethic, his creativity, and his genius. While Steve Jobs never shies away from turning a critical eye on its subject, it rightfully gives much credit to Jobs where it is due. People have long pointed out that Jobs could be an "asshole," and while the book never outright denies such a description, the sheer volume of his achievements and creations often puts the erratic and childish behavior into soft focus. In fact, the book seems to suggest that Jobs’s fantastic career was born out of his harsh, demanding attitude, rather than in spite of it. "I don’t think I run roughshod over people," Jobs told Isaacson, "but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same" (Isaacson, 568-569). Rather than exposing Jobs an "asshole," the biography presents, front to back, a human being who was essentially incapable of being phony, even if doing so would make him appear better to others.

The book also emphasizes, in anecdotes that probably aren’t totally surprising, Jobs’s belief, from the beginning of his career to the end of it, that everything should be (and was if possible), in his control. This meant not just making hardware and software into a closed ecosystem, but also controlling what could be done with the actual products once purchased. The stubborn surety that he knew what was right for himself and everyone else famously resulted in Macs and iPhones which were hard to open up and hack (even adding special screws to the latter to make it more difficult), and in the fact that the iPad wouldn’t display Flash. It also resulted, however, in Jobs stubbornly and often refusing to eat (even when sick), in a belief that being vegan meant he didn’t have to shower, and in a resistance to allow his doctors to remove the cancerous tumor on his colon for nine months in 2003.

Jobs’s managerial style (or lack of one), had been previously well-documented after his ouster from Apple, but the biography is probably at its harshest when describing his various working relationships with other people. We are presented with personal accounts of a well-known volatility that is increasingly shocking, sometimes delusional, and always, in the mind of its subject, justified. One of the true revelations of the book is that Steve Jobs cried — a lot, and in the presence of his co-workers. From the earliest days of his career when he cried to Steve Wozniak’s father Jerry about getting Woz to come work at Apple full time, he broke down in tears regularly when frustrated, when cornered, when happy or touched, and when angry. Though his return to Apple did seem to bring some temperance and evenness to his management efforts, Jobs never stopped openly crying when emotion overwhelmed him.

The sections where  Bill Gates  — who was sometimes an insider and sometimes not — weighs in, are variously the most touching, sometimes the most interesting, and often do the most to underline the great chasm of difference there was between the two personalities. While Jobs avoids branding him with his favorite and oft-used title "bozo," Gates, in this tale, truly doesn’t get it a lot of the time, but he gets that he doesn’t get it. On the success of the iPad, Gates tells Isaacson, "Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and Steve is still coming up with amazing new products," adding, "Maybe I should have stayed in that game" (Isaacson, 553).

Throughout the book, Jobs is incredibly and sometimes amusingly cutting about various friends, former colleagues, business associates, and even celebrities. Many people, in his view (including but not limited to John Mayer, President Obama, Google, and Rupert Murdoch) were constantly "blowing it." He makes it clear that grudges held could often be permanent. When speaking of Jon Rubinstein, a former Apple executive who helped give birth to the iPod and was then head of Palm, Jobs admits to having emailed Bono, a Palm investor, to complain when the company began trying to make an iPhone competitor. Bono replied that his remarks were akin to "the Beatles ringing up because Herman and the Hermits have taken one of their road crew" (Isaacson, 459). "The fact that they [Palm] completely failed salves that wound," Jobs says (Isaacson, 460).

Jobs perspective that certain things "sucked" could often be influenced by other factors. For example, it’s hard to tell if Jobs truly thought that Android is "crap," or if he says it because he was involved in a lengthy battle against Google over patent infringement. What emerges from the Android discussion, however, is that Jobs passionately believed that it was a stolen product. Isaacson was with Jobs the week Apple filed its lawsuit against Google, when Jobs was the "angriest he’d ever seen him."

"Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.’ Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products — Android, Google Docs — are shit" (Isaacson, 511-512). In fact, there are few people and companies Jobs sets his sights on who don’t fail to cut the mustard on many levels. Notable exceptions are the Beatles (who Jobs talks about at length in one of the most insightful sections of the book), his wife Laurene, and Jony Ive.

Though none of the Beatles weigh in on Jobs, both Laurene and Ive do, and Ive in particular seems to grapple with Jobs’s personality, telling Isaacson "He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that make his antisocial behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable" (Isaacson, 462). Ive is significant to the book in other ways, as Jobs’s main creative brother-in-arms, and, as the story progresses, it is clear that both men struggled with the idea of a post-Jobs Apple. For nearly the entire latter half of the book, and much of Jobs’s "phase two" at Apple, his health was a near constant concern for those closest to him, and Ive was in that inner-circle. When Jobs returned from a two-month stay in Memphis in May 2009 following his liver transplant, Ive and Cook were there to meet him and his wife on the tarmac. Both Ive and Jobs reported feeling the same way — Ive was "devastated" and "underappreciated" by media stories questioning the ability of  Apple to innovate without Jobs , while Jobs was somewhat miffed at Cook’s earnings report call where he suggested that Apple could do just that. "He didn’t know whether to be proud or hurt that it might be true," Issacson writes. "There was talk that he might step aside and become chairman rather than CEO. That made him all the more motivated to get out of his bed, overcome the pain, and start taking his restorative walks again" (Isaacson, 488). The book thus is oddly positioned in that its subject, near the end of the story, is well aware that he is very likely near the end of his career, and indeed, he tells Isaacson on their last meeting, "I’ve done all that I can do" (Isaacson, 559).

In that respect, Jobs the man is consistent throughout, expressing little regret or dissatisfaction with himself, except for his repeated wish that he had spent more time with his children, who, he says, were his main motivation for cooperating with and encouraging that a biography be written at all. In a world where people and media will pay actual money for one glimpse of a dying and frail CEO, Steve Jobs will not be the final book on the man, but it will be the only one told largely in his words, and the only one in which he had the final say on its cover. All the other books will no doubt be written by bozos who blow it.

British monarchy rocked by bad Photoshop job

A top auto safety group tested 14 partial automated systems — only one passed, airbnb is banning indoor security cameras, apple to allow ios app downloads direct from websites in the eu, porsche taycan turbo gt sets new lap record at laguna seca.

Sponsor logo

More from Apple

Woman holding a purse while modeling the Stripes watchface on the Apple Watch SE (2022)

Here are the best Apple Watch deals right now

Apple AirPods Pro

The best Presidents Day deals you can already get

An illustration of The Vergecast team, with a Vision Pro over top.

The shine comes off the Vision Pro

Epic Games logo

Apple unbanned Epic so it can make an iOS games store in the EU

  • Subscribe to BBC Science Focus Magazine
  • Previous Issues
  • Future tech
  • Everyday science
  • Planet Earth
  • Newsletters

Steve Jobs: The childhood of a great inventor

How did one curious child became the co-creator of one of the biggest tech companies in the world?

Robin Stevenson

In this extract from Kid Innovators , Robin Stevenson tells the story of a creative, rebellious child who grew up to change the world with the iPhone.

Steve Jobs is best known for Mac computers, iPhones, and iPads, but his innovative ideas also transformed the music, movie, and digital-publishing industries. As an adult, he was both brilliant and difficult. Even as a small child, he wanted to do things his own way.

Steve was born in San Francisco, on 24 February 1955. His birth parents were a graduate student named Joanna Schieble and a Syrian teaching assistant named Abdulfattah Jandali. Joanne and Abdullah had met at the University of Wisconsin, fallen in love, and traveled to Syria together. When Joanne became pregnant, they were not ready to become parents. Once back home, they decided to place their baby for adoption.

Paul and Clara Jobs had been wanting a child for many years before one finally came into their lives. They adopted Joanne and Abdullah’s son and named him Steven Paul. Steve grew into an active and curious toddler. Twice they had to rush him to the emergency room: one time because Steve had stuck a metal pin into an electric socket and burned his hand, and another time because he had eaten poison!

When Steve was two, his parents adopted a baby girl named Patty. Three years later, the family moved to the town of Mountain View, near Palo Alto, in California. Steve later said that his childhood home was one of the things that inspired him as a designer. “We had nice toasty floors when I was a kid,” he said, remembering the radiant heating in the house. “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much.”

Steve always knew he was adopted. When he was about six years old, he told a little girl who lived across the street. “So, does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” she asked. Steve ran home crying. His parents explained that was not the case at all. “We specifically picked you,” they said, speaking with great emphasis to make sure he understood. “I’ve always felt special,” Steve later said. “My parents made me feel special.”

The family’s house had a garage where Paul, a mechanic, could work on his cars. He marked off one section of a table and told Steve, “This is your workbench now.” Steve wasn’t interested in cars, but he liked spending time tinkering with his dad. When Paul went to the junkyard to look for parts, Steve went along. He admired his dad’s attention to detail. “He loved doing things right,” Steve said. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

Read more about great inventors:

  • Five women who are inventing our world and why we should celebrate their achievements
  • 10 cool projects created by kids addressing real-world problems

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Steve had many neighbours who worked as engineers. One of them, Larry Lang, became an important mentor. “What Larry did to get to know the kids in the block was rather a strange thing,” Steve explained. “He put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker.”

Steve’s father had told him that an electronic amplifier was needed to do this, but here was a system that worked without one. “I proudly went home to my father and announced that he was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with just a battery,” he recalled. “My father told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and we got into a very large argument.” So, Steve dragged his dad to Larry’s house so he could see it for himself.

Over the next few years, Larry taught Steve a lot about electronics. He introduced him to Heathkits, a type of kit with detailed instructions for making items like television receivers and radio equipment. Steve said that these kits not only taught him how things worked but also helped him develop a belief that even things that seemed complex – like televisions and radios – could be studied and understood.

Steve’s mom, Clara, taught him to read before he started kindergarten. In the classroom, though, Steve’s learning did not go smoothly. His first school was Monta Loma Elementary, just four blocks from his house. “I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble,” he admitted.

Steve’s best friend was a boy named Rick. One time, he and Rick made posters advertising “Bring Your Pet to School Day”. Kids showed up with their animals and chaos broke loose, with dogs chasing cats all over the school.

Another time, Steve and Rick persuaded the other students to tell them their bike lock combinations. Once they knew dozens of combinations, they undid the locks and switched them around. When school ended that day, the students couldn’t unlock their bikes. According to Steve, it took until ten o’clock that night to sort out the mess.

Another time, Steve let a snake loose in the classroom, and then he set off a small explosion under the teacher’s chair. By the end of third grade, Steve had been sent home from school several times. His parents didn’t punish him, though. They thought it was partly the school’s fault – Steve was misbehaving because he wasn’t being challenged in class. Steve agreed, saying that he was always being asked to “memorise stupid stuff.”

But being bored was only part of the problem. Steve also had a strong dislike for authority and hated being told what to do. Luckily, in fourth grade, he had a teacher who understood him. Mrs Hill started out by bribing Steve to do math problems, but before long, he was enjoying learning and wanted to please her. “I learned more from her than any other teacher,” Steve said. If it hadn’t been for Mrs Hill, he admitted, “I’m sure I would’ve gone to jail.”

Jobs while he was at Homestead High in 1972 © Homestead High School, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mrs Hill recognised that Steve needed to be challenged, and the school recommended that he skip two grades. His parents thought that was too much, but they agreed to let Steve move up from fourth grade to sixth. That meant switching to another school.

At Crittenden Middle School, the environment was much rougher, and fights were common. Being a year younger than the other students was hard, and Steve was often bullied. His sixth-grade report card noted that he had trouble getting motivated. Halfway through seventh grade, Steve decided he’d had enough.

“He came home one day,” recalled his father, “and said if he had to go back there again, he just wouldn’t go.” His parents decided to move to an area with better schools. They scraped together the money and bought a home in Los Altos, a few miles away.

In ninth grade, Steve started at Homestead High. The school had an electronics class with a well-equipped lab and a passionate teacher named Mr McCollum. But Steve, with his rebellious attitude and rejection of authority, clashed with the teacher. According to Mr McCollum, Steve was usually “off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class.” Although he loved electronics, Steve dropped the course.

Outside school, however, Steve was beginning to find others who shared his interests. He joined the Explorer’s Club at Hewlett-Packard, where Larry Lang worked. The students met in the cafeteria, where engineers would talk to them about their projects: lasers, holography, light-emitting diodes. Steve was in heaven. It was at HP that he saw his first computer. “I fell in love with it,” he said.

Read more biographies of inventors:

  • Nikola Tesla: A genius or a charlatan?
  • Leonardo da Vinci's forgotten legacy
  • John Bardeen: The greatest physicist you (probably) never heard of

Steve was also working on a project of his own: he wanted to build a frequency counter to measure the rate of pulses in an electronic signal. He didn’t have all the parts he needed, so he looked in the phone book for Bill Hewlett, the head of Hewlett-Packard, and called him at home. Not only did he get the parts he needed, but Bill also gave him a summer job in a factory that made frequency counters.

It was while he was still in high school that Steve Jobs met his future business partner, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was five years older and highly adept with electronics. In fact, he had learned some of his skills in Mr McCollum’s class.

When Steve was twenty-one, he and Wozniak founded the Apple Computer Company. At first, they worked out of Steve’s bedroom, and later they moved the business into the Jobs family’s garage. Two years later, Steve had earned more than a million dollars – and by the time he was 25, he’d made over 250 million dollars.

Many of the things we use in our daily lives wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Steve Jobs: Mac computers, iPhones, iPods and iPads, iTunes, Apple Stores, even Pixar’s Toy Story !

But money wasn’t what drove him. “You’ve got to find what you love,” he said. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”

Kid Innovators by Robin Stevenson is out now (£11.99, Quirk Books).

  • Buy now from Amazon UK , Waterstones or Bookshop.org

Share this article

who's steve jobs biography

  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Code of conduct
  • Magazine subscriptions
  • Manage preferences

How Steve Jobs Changed the Course of Animation

Steve Jobs

Jobs initially had Pixar focus on creating powerful hardware

As is the case now, Pixar in 1986 was staffed by a mix of techies and artists who hoped to create computer-animated films. However, since the technology to do so simply wasn't there yet, Jobs had his group focus on saleable products.

The first was the Pixar Image Computer, which produced stunning high-resolution imagery at an equally stunning price of $135,000. The machine drew some interest from hospitals and intelligence agencies, but only about 100 of them were sold.

Pixar had more success by teaming with Disney to create the computer animation production system (CAPS), which eliminated the need for hand-drawn "cels" and freed up capabilities for advanced effects. By the time The Rescuers Down Under hit theaters in 1990, Disney had made the full-time switch to digital. Another Pixar system, RenderMan, was responsible for the groundbreaking visuals in live-action films like The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991).

He eventually sold Pixar's hardware division to concentrate on short films and commercials

Meanwhile, former Disney animator John Lasseter was quietly providing a roadmap for Pixar's future by using in-house technology for innovative content. His two-minute Luxo Jr. (1986), showing two desk lamps playfully interacting with one another, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short. Two years later, the five-minute Tin Toy became the first computer-animated film to claim the Oscar in that category.

Jobs subsequently sold Pixar's hardware division and focused on generating income through short films and commercials. Still, while the company was impacting the viewing experience on both the large and small screens, it was only being kept afloat through its founder's personal checks, amounting to some $50 million through 1991.

"I kept putting more money into [Pixar], and the only bright spot was John's short films," Jobs later said. "He'd say, 'Can I have $300,000 to make a short film?' And I'd say, 'Okay, go make it.' That was the only thing that was fun. Everything else was not really working."

Edwin Catmull, Steve Jobs and John Lasseter

The release of 'Toy Story' was Pixar's big break

The company's biggest success came in 1991 when Disney revealed an interest in financing and distributing Pixar's first feature film. Previously more invested in the fortunes of NeXT, Jobs promptly inserted himself into negotiations and helped hammer out a three-movie deal for 12.5 percent of box-office receipts.

As Lasseter and the creative team labored through what became Toy Story , Jobs hired CFO Lawrence Levy to work out the details of restructuring the company for a public offering. Jobs settled on an IPO date for shortly after the Thanksgiving 1995 release of Toy Story , tying the company's fate to the opening weekend box office numbers of its first massive undertaking.

It proved a worthwhile gamble, as the combination of Pixar's technical wizardry, a heartwarming story and a voice cast headlined by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen propelled Toy Story to an impressive $30 million opening weekend (en route to a global haul of $365 million). Days later, Pixar closed at $39 per share after its first day of trading, the once-struggling company now valued at $1.5 billion.

While the success made Jobs a very wealthy man, he realized there was a lot more to be made from the licensing revenue that was fully flowing into Disney's coffers. In 1997, Disney CEO Michael Eisner agreed to a new five-movie deal in which the two sides split all costs and profits, placing Pixar on equal footing with the company that had dominated the animation industry for the past 60 years.

Jobs saw Pixar as a side project

For Jobs, who sold NeXT to Apple and made a triumphant return to his old company in 1997, Pixar remained something of a side project; day-to-day operations were left to Lasseter and CTO Ed Catmull, the boss only showing up about once per week.

When he did appear, employees took note of the kinder, gentler Jobs in their presence. The tempestuous CEO who publicly dressed down underlings was all but nonexistent here, replaced by one willing to listen and address potentially embarrassing situations in private.

Furthermore, Pixar's top-grade creative team grew to value his input. According to Catmull, Jobs had a knack for cutting to the core of a film's problems after an early screening, his insight serving as a "gut punch" that often sparked significant improvements.

He sold Pixar for $7 billion just two decades after Jobs bought to company

Following the smashing success of Monsters, Inc. in 2002, Jobs again sought to negotiate a more favorable deal from Eisner. His attempt at hardball left the two at an impasse, but Jobs eventually found a more receptive audience with the arrival of new Disney CEO Bob Iger in 2005.

When Iger offered to buy Pixar outright, Jobs made sure his top two lieutenants, Lasseter and Catmull, were okay with the transaction, before ensuring they were given full reign to run Disney Animation. He left the company for good with the completion of a $7.4 billion sale in January 2006, going on to cement his legacy in his final years at Apple while his old gang kept the hits coming with movies like Cars (2006), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009) and continuing the Toy Story franchise.

While Jobs didn't design the graphics or create the characters that made Pixar a household name, his stewardship provided the means for an oddball group of creatives to find their footing and become the driving force behind some of the most successful and popular films of the past 20 years.

As Lasseter and Catmull noted in a statement after Jobs died in October 2011: "Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer-animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply 'make it great.' He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity, and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar's DNA."

Famous Business Leaders

black and white photo of madam cj walker

Enzo Ferrari

piero ferrari standing in front of a vintage ferrari race car at a museum

Get to Know Enzo Ferrari’s Sons, Piero and Dino

suge knight

Suge Knight

rupert murdoch wears a suit jacket, a white collared shirt that is unbuttoned at the neck and tortoise brown glasses

Rupert Murdoch

scooter braun looking offscreen at photographers in front of a backdrop

Who Is Music Mogul Scooter Braun?

beanie babies founder ty warner warner shaking the hand of a visitor at a toy expo

Ty Warner's Complicated Life Beyond Beanie Babies

elizabeth holmes smiles and looks past the camera, she is wearing a black turtleneck and red lipstick

Elizabeth Holmes

jeff bezos smiles at the camera, he wears a black suit and tie with a white collared shirt, behind him is a light gray background

Martha Stewart Headlining 'SI' Swimsuit Issue

linda yaccarino smiling for a photo with her right hand on her hip

Who Is New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino?

A tech entrepreneur shared the advice Steve Jobs once gave him that's helped him find success and happiness in his career

  • Ron Gutman said Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech when he graduated from Stanford University.
  • "The only way to be successful is to do what you love," Gutman recalled from the speech.  
  • Gutman, the founder of several companies, also advises people to frame challenges as adventures.

Insider Today

A serial tech entrepreneur recalled some words of wisdom that Steve Jobs shared with him that have helped him face challenges over his career and kept him moving forward. 

Ron Gutman is a technology and healthcare entrepreneur and the cofounder of digital health company Intrivo, which invented the On/Go COVID-19 rapid at-home test used by millions of people in the US. Gutman is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University.

Gutman, who has headed numerous companies during his career, told Business Insider that Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech when he graduated from Stanford in 2005. One piece of advice stayed with him over the years. 

"What Steve used to say, and he said it in one of the discussions that I had with him: 'The only way to be successful is to do what you love,'" Gutman told BI in an interview. "I would add that the only way to be happy is to do what you love." 

Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford  on June 12, 2005, and shared a story about being fired from Apple 10 years after co-founding it with Steve Wozniak . Jobs said it led to a creative period in his life during which he founded two companies and fell in love. 

Apple later acquired one of Jobs' companies and he returned to the tech giant. 

"I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did," Jobs said during the speech. "You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

Frame challenges as adventures 

Gutman explained that if you're not passionate about the work you're doing or are solely motivated by money, you're more likely to give it up for something else. 

Instead, he advises people to do work they love and frame challenges as adventures. 

"I always translate challenges to adventures," he said. "You could look at it as if you're in the hero's journey and you're just slaying dragons. You're doing what you need to do to make sure that things are working and it's tough and it's difficult and the world is terrible but it's just a matter of framing."

Keeping a positive mindset can turn a challenge into something that is exciting and a learning opportunity. 

Additionally, surrounding yourself with people you love working with turns every challenge into an adventure.

"The people that are in your vicinity, your team, your peers, the area in the industry that you're choosing to tackle, make sure that these are people that you enjoy being with even if it wasn't work," Gutman said. 

"If you get into this challenging craziness, you're like 'Okay, I'm surrounded by great people. We're in this together. We're helping each other,' and it makes the whole thing an adventure." 

Watch: Steve Jobs' biographer reveals the childhood moment that defined the Apple founder

who's steve jobs biography

  • Main content

IMAGES

  1. Steve Jobs: A Biography by Michael Becraft (English) Hardcover Book

    who's steve jobs biography

  2. Steve Jobs Biography

    who's steve jobs biography

  3. Steve Jobs Biography

    who's steve jobs biography

  4. Steve Jobs

    who's steve jobs biography

  5. Steve Jobs Biography and Life History

    who's steve jobs biography

  6. Steve Jobs Biography

    who's steve jobs biography

VIDEO

  1. STEVE JOBS

  2. Early life of Steve Jobs

  3. Steve Jobs Biography Part: 4

  4. Steve Jobs Career

  5. Steve Jobs/ Biography by Walter Isaacson/ G.English/ B.A B.SC/ 6th Semester/ Kashmir University

  6. 3 minutes biography of Steve Jobs' #biography #steve #stevejobs #apple #applewatch #appleiphone

COMMENTS

  1. Steve Jobs

    Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology giant Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his ...

  2. Steve Jobs: Biography, Apple Cofounder, Entrepreneur

    In 1976, Steve Jobs cofounded Apple with Steve Wozniak. Learn about the entrepreneur's career, net worth, parents, wife, children, education, and death in 2011.

  3. Steve Jobs

    He dropped out of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism. Apple I. Steve Jobs (right) and Steve Wozniak holding an Apple I circuit board, c. 1976. Back in Silicon Valley in the autumn of 1974, Jobs ...

  4. Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

    Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955-October 5, 2011) is best remembered as the co-founder of Apple Computers. He teamed up with inventor Steve Wozniak to create one of the first ready-made PCs. Besides his legacy with Apple, Jobs was also a smart businessman who became a multimillionaire before the age of 30. In 1984, he founded NeXT computers.

  5. Steve Jobs Biography

    An overview of Steve Jobs' life. Steven Paul Jobs was an American business owner, entrepreneur, investor and media proprietor. He was best known for co-founding and leading Apple, one of the most ...

  6. Steve Jobs Biography

    Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, 1955, to two university students Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born John Jandali. They were both unmarried at the time, and Steven was given up for adoption. Steven was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, whom he always considered to be his real parents. Steven's father, Paul, encouraged him to experiment with ...

  7. Steve Jobs

    Jobs met an old high school friend, Steve Wozniak, at a computer club meeting. Wozniak had been attempting to design a smaller, more personal computer, and Jobs was soon drawn to the hypothetical device's marketing potential. In 1976, at the age of 21, Jobs started the Apple Computer Company together with Wozniak.

  8. Steve Jobs Biography

    As the co-founder of Apple Computers and the former chairman of Pixar Animation Studios, he revolutionized the computer and animation industries, amassing a fortune worth $10.2 billion at the time ...

  9. Steve Jobs summary

    Steve Wozniak American electronics engineer, cofounder, with Steve Jobs, of Apple Computer, and designer of the first commercially successful personal computer. Wozniak—or "Woz," as he was commonly known—was the son of an electrical engineer for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale,

  10. Steve Jobs: From Garage to World's Most Valuable Company

    Steven Paul Jobs was born February 24, 1955, and died October 5, 2011. Explore further. Steve Jobs original iPod introduction; Watch the CHM lecture: Steve Jobs: The Authorized Biography. An Evening with Walter Isaacson; Stanford University Commencement Speech; Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011

  11. Obituary: Steve Jobs

    Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on 24 Feb 1955, the son of two unmarried university students, Joanne Schieble and Syrian born Abdulfattah Jandali. His parents gave him up for adoption ...

  12. Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple : NPR

    Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was published Monday, less than three weeks after Job's death on Oct. 5. When Steve Jobs was 6 years old, his young next door neighbor ...

  13. Steve Jobs

    Steve Jobs Biography. The well-known businessman, computer genius, and even digital entertainment Steve Paul Jobs, better known as Steve Jobs, was born in the city of San Francisco, California, the United States, on February 24, 1955, and died in the city of Palo Alto, California, United States, on October 5, 2011.He is recognized for his role as the co-founder of Apple Inc.

  14. Steve Jobs

    Walter Isaacson's "enthralling" (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly ...

  15. The Early Influences That Shaped Jobs' Vision

    The iPad achieved sales of 100 million units by just 2.5 years after launch - the same timeframe as the iPhone. This established the iPad as Apple's third revolutionary product developed under Jobs. Steve Jobs has been described as a modern day Thomas Edison in the sheer breadth of industries he upended.

  16. Steve Jobs: The Story Of The Man Behind The Personal Computer

    The movie "Steve Jobs," with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin based on the best-selling biography by Walter Isaacson, opens today in New York and LA. Today on FRESH AIR, we'll listen back to Terry's ...

  17. Steve Jobs Biographies Duel Over Soul of the Man

    March 25, 2015 9:36 AM EDT. I n 2011 Walter Isaacson published a biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Isaacson's biography was fully authorized by its subject: Jobs handpicked Isaacson, who ...

  18. Steve Jobs (book)

    Steve Jobs is the authorized self-titled biography of American business magnate and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.The book was written at the request of Jobs by Walter Isaacson, a former executive at CNN and Time who had previously written best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.. Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—in addition to ...

  19. The Real Genius of Steve Jobs

    Steve Jobs, Isaacson's biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. "There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth," Powell ...

  20. Amazon.com: Steve Jobs: 9781451648539: Isaacson, Walter: Books

    Walter Isaacson's "enthralling" (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly ...

  21. Book review: 'Steve Jobs' by Walter Isaacson

    In many ways, the Jobs of the early '80s at the outset of his breathtaking career is the same feisty and impetuous man we find at the end of the book, picking apart his plans to build a yacht ...

  22. Steve Jobs: The childhood of a great inventor

    Steve Jobs: The childhood of a great inventor - BBC Science Focus Magazine.

  23. How Steve Jobs Changed the Course of Animation

    He left the company for good with the completion of a $7.4 billion sale in January 2006, going on to cement his legacy in his final years at Apple while his old gang kept the hits coming with ...

  24. Steve Lawrence of Steve and Eydie Dies at 88

    Singer, comedian, and actor Steve Lawrence died March 7 after a multi-year long battle with Alzheimer's Disease. He was 88. Born Sidney Liebowitz, Mr. Lawrence was the son of a Brooklyn cantor ...

  25. Steve Jobs Once Said 'Do What You Love.' This Entrepreneur Took His Advice

    Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford on June 12, 2005, and shared a story about being fired from Apple 10 years after co-founding it with Steve Wozniak.Jobs said it led to a creative ...