Steve Jobs

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Steve Jobs died on the 5th of October 2011, and he had arranged one last gesture for the people who came to remember him. At the memorial held at Stanford University, every guest received a small brown box as a farewell gift from him. Inside each box was a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi, a book published in 1946 by Paramahansa Yogananda. Jobs himself was buried, at his own request, in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, the only nonsectarian cemetery in Palo Alto.

  Those choices seem strange for a man whose name is attached to computers, phones and animated films. What shaped a person who wanted his farewell to point toward a book on spiritual searching? How did one individual come to be tied to so many companies and products that millions of people use? And why do the people who worked beside him describe someone both admired and feared?

  41253860

• 2. Outsider Years

  ›

  Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on the 24th of February 1955. His biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, came from a wealthy Syrian family and was studying political science at the University of Wisconsin. His mother, Joanne Schieble, came from a Catholic family that owned a mink farm and real estate in Green Bay. Her father objected to Jandali because he was Muslim, so she arranged a closed adoption and traveled to San Francisco to give birth.

  Schieble asked that her son go to college graduates. A lawyer and his wife were chosen, but they backed out when they learned the baby was a boy. Paul and Clara Jobs took him instead. Neither of them had a college education, and Schieble at first refused to sign the papers and went to court. She gave way only after they promised to pay for his college tuition.

  When Jobs was in high school, Clara confided to his girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, that she "was too frightened to love Steve for the first six months of his life." Jobs already knew, and he said he had been deeply loved and indulged. He bristled when people called Paul and Clara his adoptive parents. He counted them as his parents "1,000%" and called his biological parents "my sperm and egg bank."

  By 1959 the family lived in the Monta Loma neighborhood of Mountain View, California. Paul built his son a workbench in the garage to pass along a love of mechanics. Jobs admired his father because "he knew how to build anything." Classrooms were a different story. Jobs resisted authority, played pranks at Monta Loma Elementary, and was suspended a few times. Paul never scolded him and instead blamed the school for failing to challenge a brilliant boy.

  Jobs skipped the 5th grade and landed at Crittenden Middle School, where he became a socially awkward loner who was often bullied. In the middle of 7th grade he gave his parents an ultimatum. Either they took him out of the school or he would stop attending. The family spent every dollar of their savings on a new house in 1967, in the better Cupertino School District.

  At 13, in 1968, Jobs phoned Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard to ask for parts for an electronics project. Hewlett gave him a summer job. That autumn he started at Homestead High School, which had strong ties to Silicon Valley. He took the electronics class of John McCollum, but his long hair and counterculture leanings clashed with the teacher, and he lost interest.

  A Homestead classmate remembered him as too intellectual for the hippies and too unconventional for the nerds. "He was kind of an outsider," the classmate said. Jobs began listening to music constantly and reading beyond science, including Shakespeare and Plato. He loved King Lear. In his senior year he also began using LSD, and he later described one trip in a wheat field outside Sunnyvale as "the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point."

  In September 1972 Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He had applied only to Reed, even though Paul and Clara could barely afford it. After a single semester he dropped out without telling his parents. He said he did not want to spend their money on an education that felt meaningless. He kept attending by auditing classes, among them a calligraphy course taught by Robert Palladino.

  In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Jobs described sleeping on the floor of friends' dorm rooms and returning Coke bottles for food money. He also ate a free weekly meal at the local Hare Krishna temple. Of the calligraphy class he said: "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

  In mid-1974 Jobs traveled to India with his Reed friend Daniel Kottke, hoping to meet the teacher Neem Karoli Baba at the Kainchi ashram. They found it nearly deserted, because the teacher had died in September 1973. They trekked up a dry riverbed to the ashram of Haidakhan Babaji instead. After seven months Jobs flew home with a shaved head and traditional Indian clothing.

  Back in the United States he spent time at the All One Farm, a commune in Oregon owned by Robert Friedland. Jobs and Brennan studied Zen Buddhism under the master Kōbun Chino Otogawa. Jobs joined long meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the country. He even considered living at the monastery Eihei-ji in Japan. He called his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life."

  In early 1975 he went back to Atari, where an assignment was waiting that would need a friend's help.

  56212532

• 3. Woz and the Garage

  ›

  The article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" appeared in the October 1971 issue of Esquire and sparked Jobs's first business. Steve Wozniak read it and designed a cheap digital blue box that generated the tones needed to manipulate the telephone network and make free long-distance calls. Jobs proposed selling them and splitting the profit. In a 1994 interview he said it took the two of them six months to design the boxes.

  The illegal sales went well, and Jobs later said that without them "there wouldn't have been an Apple." The boxes showed the pair that they could take on large companies and win. They also hinted to Jobs that electronics could be fun and profitable at once.

  Atari had hired Jobs as a technician at its Los Gatos office in early 1974. According to Wozniak, the company took Jobs on only because he brought in a Pong board Wozniak had designed, and Atari assumed Jobs had built it. Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell later called him "difficult but valuable." Bushnell added that Jobs was often the smartest person in the room and let others know it.

  In the summer of 1975 Bushnell asked Jobs to design a circuit board for the arcade game Breakout using as few chips as possible. Atari offered US$100 for every chip removed. Jobs recruited Wozniak, who sketched the design during his day job at HP and refined it with Jobs at Atari at night. Within four days Wozniak cut the chip count to 45, far below the usual 100.

  Jobs then told Wozniak that Atari had paid only US$750, so Wozniak's half came to US$375. The real bonus was US$5,000. Wozniak learned the truth ten years later. He said he would gladly have given Jobs the money had he simply explained that he needed it.

  By March 1976 Wozniak had finished the basic design of the Apple I. Jobs suggested they sell it. Wozniak was skeptical at first but came around. On the 1st of April 1976, Jobs, Wozniak and an administrative overseer named Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company as a partnership at the Jobs family home on Crist Drive. Wayne soon left. The name came from Jobs's stories of the apple orchard at the All One Farm.

  The plan was modest. Jobs meant to sell bare circuit boards to hobbyists for US$50 each. To pay for the first batch, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen van. Computer retailer Paul Terrell then ordered 50 fully assembled units at US$500 apiece. About 200 Apple I computers were built in all.

  Not everyone was impressed. A neighbor named Larry Waterland, who had just earned a chemical engineering PhD at Stanford, remembered Jobs showing him a circuit board, a TV set, a cassette deck and a keyboard. "You've got to be joking," he replied. Kottke recalled that only he worked in the garage, with Wozniak turning up weekly with new code. Jobs spent hours on the phone in the kitchen hunting for investors.

  He found them. Mike Markkula, a semi-retired Intel marketing manager and engineer, put money into the company. Markkula brought in Arthur Rock, who saw the crowded Apple booth at a Home Brew Computer Show and started with a US$60,000 investment. In February 1977 Markkula hired Mike Scott from National Semiconductor as Apple's first president and CEO. Jobs was not pleased.

  Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II in April 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire, and it first went on sale on the 10th of June 1977. Wozniak designed most of it. Jobs oversaw its unusual case, and Rod Holt created its power supply. During design, Jobs wanted two expansion slots and Wozniak wanted eight. After a heated argument, Wozniak told him to "go get himself another computer." They settled on eight.

  Later, Wozniak put his own view bluntly: "Steve didn't ever code. He wasn't an engineer and he didn't do any original design." Kottke agreed that Wozniak was the inventor and Jobs was the marketing person. At 23, in 1978, Jobs was worth more than US$1 million. By 25 his fortune was estimated at US$250 million.

  1629525055

• 4. A Daughter and a Machine

  ›

  In October 1977 Chrisann Brennan realized she was pregnant, and she told Jobs a few days later. By her account, his face "turned ugly" at the news. He refused to discuss the pregnancy, and she left Apple. A few weeks before her due date, she accepted an invitation from Robert Friedland to give birth at the All One Farm.

  Lisa Brennan was born there on the 17th of May 1978, when Jobs was 23, the same age his biological parents had been. Friedland contacted Jobs, and he came for the birth. The two of them discussed names while sitting on a blanket in the fields, and Brennan suggested Lisa. Yet Jobs was publicly denying paternity at the time.

  A DNA test later established him as the father. It required him to pay Brennan US$385 a month and to repay the welfare money she had received. When Apple went public and made him a millionaire, he was paying her US$500 a month.

  On the 3rd of January 1983 Time published its Person of the Year issue. The magazine passed over Jobs and named the personal computer its Machine of the Year. Brennan had given an interview about Jobs for the issue. In it Jobs challenged the paternity test, which put the probability of his fatherhood at 94.1%. He argued that "28% of the male population of the United States could be the father."

  Time also noted that the baby girl and the machine Apple was betting on shared a name: Lisa. Brennan said Jobs hid the computer's plans from her and never had her permission to use the name. His first choice for the machine had been "Claire," after St. Clare. His team then produced "Local Integrated Software Architecture" as another explanation for the name. Decades later Jobs admitted to his biographer Walter Isaacson: "obviously, it was named for my daughter."

  The computer began as a project in 1978. In 1979 Jobs saw the commercial potential in the Xerox Alto, a mouse-driven machine with a graphical user interface. The Lisa reached business customers in the early 1980s as the first personal computer with such an interface. It sold only 100,000 units, a commercial failure, yet it won technical praise. Several of its advanced features reappeared on the Macintosh and later on IBM PC compatibles.

  Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project before it succeeded. The last model, the Lisa 2/10, was reworked and sold as the Macintosh XL.

  56575859

• 5. Macintosh and the Ouster

  ›

  Jef Raskin conceived the Macintosh, but in 1981 Jobs took over its development. Wozniak had shaped the early program, and he was on leave after an airplane crash that year, which made the takeover easier. Jobs also drew on the Lisa, which had itself been inspired by the mouse-driven interface at Xerox PARC.

  In 1983 Jobs persuaded John Sculley to leave Pepsi-Cola and become Apple's CEO. His pitch was a question: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"

  On the 22nd of January 1984, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, Apple aired a commercial called "1984." Ridley Scott directed it at a cost of US$1.5 million. An unnamed heroine, wearing a Picasso-style picture of the computer on her white tank top, stood in for the Macintosh. She rescued humanity from conformity, a nod to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and its televised "Big Brother." Marketing executive Regis McKenna called the ad "more successful than the Mac itself."

  Two days later, on the 24th of January 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholders meeting in the Flint Auditorium at De Anza College. Engineer Andy Hertzfeld called the scene "pandemonium." Reviews were glowing and early sales were strong. But the machine was slow and had little software, and sales fell fast in the second half of 1984. It was also expensive in a market dominated by the Commodore 64 for consumers and the IBM PC and its clones for business.

  Inside Apple, the two leaders disagreed about the future. Sculley liked open-architecture machines like the Apple II, aimed at schools, small businesses and homes. Jobs wanted to build the company around the closed-architecture Macintosh, as a business alternative to the IBM PC. As chairman, Jobs ran the Macintosh division almost like a separate company from the Apple II division, with duplicated services.

  The Apple II still produced 85% of Apple's sales in early 1985. Yet the January 1985 annual meeting never mentioned that division or its employees. Many people left, including Wozniak, who said the company had been heading in the wrong direction for five years and sold most of his stock. He departed amicably, stayed an honorary employee, and kept a lifelong friendship with Jobs.

  In May 1985 Sculley, encouraged by Arthur Rock, proposed moving Jobs out of the Macintosh group and into "New Product Development." That would have stripped him of real power. Jobs drew up a plan to oust Sculley, but it leaked. When confronted, he said he would leave. The board declined his offer and asked him to reconsider. On the 17th of September 1985 he submitted a letter of resignation, and five senior colleagues quit to join him.

  The Macintosh kept struggling after he left. In 1985 Bill Gates's Microsoft threatened to stop making Mac software unless it received a license for the Mac operating system, since Microsoft did not want a lawsuit over the similarity of its own Windows interface. Sculley granted the license, and it later caused Apple trouble. Through the late 1980s, cheap clones running Windows kept improving and took a growing share of the market.

  6472796768

• 6. NeXT and Pixar

  ›

  After resigning, Jobs started NeXT in 1985 with US$7 million. A year later the money was running low and no product was in sight. Billionaire Ross Perot noticed and invested heavily. On Wednesday the 12th of October 1988, Jobs staged a lavish invitation-only launch, described as a multimedia extravaganza, at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. It was widely seen as his comeback.

  NeXT workstations went on sale in 1990 at US$9,999. Like the Lisa, they were technically advanced and aimed at education, and many dismissed them as too costly. They did have admirers, drawn by features such as the Mach kernel, a digital signal processor chip and a built-in Ethernet port. The English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT machine at CERN in Switzerland in 1990 to invent the World Wide Web.

  The second-generation NeXTcube arrived that same year. Jobs billed it as the first "interpersonal" computer, thanks to NeXTMail, which could carry voice, images, graphics and video in email. His obsession with perfection, visible in the cube's magnesium case, strained the hardware division. In 1993, after selling only 50,000 machines, NeXT turned to software with NeXTSTEP/Intel. It reported its first yearly profit, US$1.03 million, in 1994.

  In 1996 the company released WebObjects, a framework for building web applications. After Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, WebObjects ran the Apple Store, MobileMe and the iTunes Store.

  A second venture began in 1986, when Jobs paid US$10 million to spin off The Graphics Group from the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. Half of the money went to the new company as capital and half to Lucasfilm for technology rights. The company was later renamed Pixar. Its first film with Disney, Toy Story, came out in 1995 with Jobs as executive producer, and it brought both money and acclaim.

  Under creative chief John Lasseter, Pixar went on to hits including Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3. Each of those won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, a category introduced in 2001.

  The partnership with Disney nearly broke down. In 2003 and 2004, with Pixar's contract running out, Jobs and Disney chief executive Michael Eisner failed to agree on new terms. In January 2004 Jobs announced he would never deal with Disney again. Bob Iger replaced Eisner in October 2005 and moved quickly to repair relations. On the 24th of January 2006 they announced that Disney would buy Pixar in an all-stock deal worth US$7.4 billion. Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder, with about 7% of the stock.

  Iger recalled that people had warned him Jobs "would bully me and everyone else." As a board member, he wrote, Jobs "rarely created trouble for me." Pixar's Floyd Norman remembered a mellow man who never meddled in the filmmakers' creative work. Pixar cofounder Edwin Catmull described, in his 2014 book Creativity, Inc., how arguments with Jobs went. Jobs could out-think him on the spot, so Catmull would wait a week and return with a counterargument. About a third of the time Jobs conceded, and about a third of the time Catmull decided Jobs was right. In the remaining third, Jobs let him have his way and dropped the subject.

  Pixar's first film after Jobs died, Brave, carried a tribute to him.

  7378859195

• 7. The Second Act at Apple

  ›

  By 1996 Apple was struggling, and its survival depended on finishing a new operating system. Talks to buy Be Inc. failed. In December Apple instead struck a deal to buy NeXT for US$400 million, finalized in February 1997. That brought Jobs back to the company he had cofounded. When CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997, Jobs became the de facto leader. On the 16th of September 1997 he was formally named interim chief executive.

  In March 1998 he cancelled projects including Newton, Cyberdog and OpenDoc to refocus the company on profit. For a time employees dreaded meeting him in the elevator, fearing they would lose their jobs before the doors opened. According to one account, his summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company. He also changed the Macintosh clone licensing program so that it became too costly for manufacturers to continue. At the 2000 Macworld Expo he dropped the word "interim" and joked that he would use the title "iCEO."

  The turnaround rested on products. NeXTSTEP evolved into Mac OS X. The iMac of 1998, in translucent Bondi Blue plastic, looked like no personal computer before it. Apple bragged that "the back of our computer looks better than the front of anyone else's." It sold for US$1,299, skipped the floppy disk drive and used only USB for peripherals. Many early USB accessories were made of translucent plastic to match it.

  The first iPod went on sale on the 23rd of October 2001. Its 1.8-inch hard drive was much smaller than the 2.5-inch drives then common in music players. Capacity ranged from 5 GB to 10 GB, the price was US$399, and more than 100,000 sold before the year ended. The iPod, iTunes and the iTunes Store pulled Apple into consumer electronics and music distribution. On the 29th of June 2007 Apple entered the phone business with the iPhone. Time named it Invention of the Year for 2007.

  Jobs's feud with Michael Dell ran for years. In 1987 he mocked Dell for making "un-innovative beige boxes." On the 6th of October 1997, at a Gartner Symposium, Dell was asked what he would do with the troubled Apple. "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," he said. In 2006, after Apple's market value passed Dell's, Jobs emailed all employees: "Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future." He added that stocks go up and down but the moment deserved reflection.

  People admired and criticized his talent for persuasion, nicknamed the "reality distortion field." It showed most in his keynote talks, known as "Stevenotes," at Macworld Expos and Apple developer conferences. On stage and off, he wore a black mock turtleneck made by Issey Miyake, Levi's 501 jeans and New Balance 991 sneakers. He told Isaacson that he liked having a uniform for convenience and for its signature style.

  In his January 2007 Macworld keynote he quoted ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." He also reminded his staff that "real artists ship." In a 2011 interview with Isaacson, he said he had told President Barack Obama he was "headed for a one-term presidency." He also urged that foreign students earning engineering degrees at American universities should automatically be offered green cards.

  He shaped products through design rather than code. Working with British designer Jony Ive, he helped bring the iMac, iPod, iPhone, App Store and iPad to market. His design taste drew on Zen and Buddhism, and the industrial designer Richard Sapper taught him about product design. He was listed as a primary or co-inventor on 346 US patents or applications. He and Ive shared 200 of them, and most were design patents. Only 43 were issued patents on inventions. His own contribution, it was said, was the "look and feel of the product."

  He was also known as a perfectionist, and few people could stand up to him. Joanna Hoffman, a marketing executive who worked with him at Apple and NeXT, was one of them. In 2011, the company he had rescued from near bankruptcy became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

  1009984904

• 8. Illness and Farewell

  ›

  In October 2003 doctors diagnosed Jobs with cancer, and in mid-2004 he told his employees he had a tumor in his pancreas. He said it was a rare, less aggressive form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. Even so, for nine months he resisted his doctors' advice to have surgery. He tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and treatments found online, and he even consulted a psychic. "I didn't want my body to be opened, I didn't want to be violated in that way," he told Isaacson.

  He finally had surgery in July 2004, a pancreaticoduodenectomy known as the Whipple procedure, which appeared to remove the tumor. He received no chemotherapy or radiation. Tim Cook, Apple's head of worldwide sales and operations, ran the company during his absence. Experts disagreed about the delay. Cancer researcher David Gorski guessed it only modestly cut his chances, while Barrie Cassileth of Memorial Sloan Kettering said his faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.

  By January 2006 the cancer had returned, and only Jobs's wife, his doctors and Iger knew. He told Iger privately that he hoped to live to see his son Reed graduate from high school in 2010. In early August 2006 he looked thin and almost gaunt during the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, and he handed large parts of it to other presenters. Speculation spread. Attendees who saw him in person said he looked fine.

  Questions returned after his 2008 keynote. Apple said he had a "common bug" and was taking antibiotics. On the 28th of August 2008, Bloomberg mistakenly published a 2,500-word obituary of Jobs, with blanks for his age and cause of death. At the September 2008 Let's Rock event he answered with a paraphrase of Mark Twain: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." At a later event he ended with a slide reading "110/70," his blood pressure, and said he would take no more questions about his health.

  In January 2009 Jobs said a "hormone imbalance" had troubled him for months. On the 14th of January he wrote in an internal memo that his health problems were "more complex than I originally thought," and he took a six-month leave. Cook offered part of his liver, since they shared a rare blood type. Jobs yelled, "I'll never let you do that." In April 2009 he received a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tennessee.

  On the 17th of January 2011 he took another leave. Still, he appeared at the iPad 2 launch on the 2nd of March, at the iCloud keynote on the 6th of June and before the Cupertino City Council on the 7th of June. On the 24th of August 2011 he resigned as CEO, writing to the board: "Unfortunately, that day has come." Cook succeeded him, and Jobs became chairman. He kept working until the day before he died, six weeks later.

  Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, of respiratory arrest from a relapse of his pancreatic tumor. He had lost consciousness the day before, and his wife, children and sisters were with him. His sister Mona Simpson wrote that he looked at his sister Patty, then at his children, then at his wife, Laurene, and then past them. His final words, repeated three times, were: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

  A small private funeral took place on the 7th of October 2011. For two weeks Apple's website showed only his name, lifespan and a grayscale portrait. Apple and Microsoft flew flags at half-staff at their campuses, and Iger ordered Disney's parks to do the same from the 6th to the 12th of October. At a private memorial in Cupertino on the 19th of October, guests included Tim Cook, Norah Jones, Al Gore and Coldplay. Governor Jerry Brown declared Sunday the 16th of October 2011 "Steve Jobs Day," and Bono, Yo-Yo Ma and Joan Baez performed at the Stanford service. In 2022 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  Even in the hospital he kept designing. He sketched devices to hold an iPad beside a hospital bed, and he disliked the oxygen monitor on his finger and suggested simpler versions. The patent for the Dock in Mac OS X, with its magnification feature, was issued the day before he died.

  6371416194