what is the best biography of steve jobs

In 1976, Steve Jobs cofounded Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs’ guidance, the company pioneered a series of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.

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Steve jobs’ parents and adoption, early life and education, founding and leaving apple computer inc., creating next, steve jobs and pixar, returning to and reinventing apple, wife and children, pancreatic cancer diagnosis and health challenges, death and last words, movies and book about steve jobs, who was steve jobs.

Steve Jobs was an American inventor, designer, and entrepreneur who was the cofounder, chief executive, and chairman of Apple Inc. Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different pursuits before cofounding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar Animation Studios, then returned to Apple more than a decade later. The tech giant’s revolutionary products, which include the iPhone, iPad, and iPod, have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Jobs died in 2011 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

FULL NAME: Steven Paul Jobs BORN: February 24, 1955 DIED: October 5, 2011 BIRTHPLACE: San Francisco, California SPOUSE: Laurene Powell (1991-2011) CHILDREN: Lisa, Reed, Erin, and Eve ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Pisces

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption. As an infant, Jobs was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant, and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist.

Jobs’ biological father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor. His biological mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Jobs was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

Jobs lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley. He was curious from childhood, sometimes to his detriment. According to the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Jobs was taken to the emergency room twice as a toddler—once after sticking a pin into an electrical socket and burning his hand, and another time because he had ingested poison. His mother Clara had taught him to read by the time he started kindergarten.

As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Although Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined.

While attending Homestead High School, Jobs joined the Explorer’s Club at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he saw a computer for the first time. He even picked up a summer job with HP after calling company cofounder Bill Hewlett to ask for parts for a frequency counter he was building. It was at HP that a teenaged Jobs met he met his future partner and cofounder of Apple Computer Steve Wozniak , who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he withdrew from college after six months and spent the next year and a half dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later, he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs’ family garage. Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his beloved scientific calculator to fund their entrepreneurial venture. Through Apple, the men are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive, and accessible to everyday consumers.

Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and—with Jobs in charge of marketing—Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple’s second model, the Apple II, the company’s sales increased exponentially to $139 million.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its first day of trading. However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.

Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple in 1983. The next year, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM’s PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.

Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company’s executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he cofounded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and left Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs personally invested $12 million to begin a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT Inc. The company introduced its first computer in 1988, with Jobs hoping it would appeal to universities and researchers. But with a base price of $6,500, the machine was far out of the range of most potential buyers.

The company’s operating system NeXTSTEP fared better, with programmers using it to develop video games like Quake and Doom . Tim Berners-Lee, who created the first web browser, used an NeXT computer. However, the company struggled to appeal to mainstream America, and Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429 million.

In 1986, Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas , which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar’s potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money in the company.

The studio went on to produce wildly popular movies such as Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), and Up (2009) . Pixar merged with Disney in 2006, which made Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney. As of June 2022, Pixar films had collectively grossed $14.7 billion at the global box office.

In 1997, Jobs returned to his post as Apple’s CEO. Just as Jobs instigated Apple’s success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s.

With a new management team, altered stock options, and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. Jobs’ ingenious products like the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.

In the ensuing years, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod, and iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology. Almost immediately after Apple released a new product, competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies. To mark its expanded product offerings, the company officially rebranded as Apple Inc. in 2007.

Apple’s quarterly reports improved significantly that year: Stocks were worth $199.99 a share—a record-breaking number at that time—and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion profit, an $18 billion surplus in the bank, and zero debt.

In 2008, fueled by iTunes and iPod sales, Apple became the second-biggest music retailer in America behind Walmart. Apple has also been ranked No. 1 on Fortune ’s list of America’s Most Admired Companies, as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Apple has released dozens of versions of the iPhone since its 2007 debut. In February 2023, an unwrapped first generation phone sold at auction for more than $63,000.

According to Forbes , Jobs’ net worth peaked at $8.3 billion shortly before he died in 2011. Celebrity Net Worth estimates it was as high as $10.2 billion.

Apple hit a market capitalization of $3 trillion in January 2022, meaning Jobs’ initial stake in the company from 1980 would have been worth about $330 billion—enough to comfortably make him the richest person in the world over Tesla founder Elon Musk had he been alive. But according to the New York Post , Jobs sold off all but one of his Apple shares when he left the company in 1985.

Most of Jobs’ net worth came from a roughly 8 percent share in Disney he acquired when he sold Pixar in 2006. Based on Disney’s 2022 value, that share—which he passed onto his wife—is worth $22 billion.

Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto with their three children: Reed (born September 22, 1991), Erin (born August 19, 1995), and Eve (born July 9, 1998).

Jobs also fathered a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan on May 17, 1978, when he was 23. He denied paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile. In her memoir Small Fry , Lisa wrote DNA tests revealed that she and Jobs were a match in 1980, and he was required to begin making paternity payments to her financially struggling mother. Jobs didn’t initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father. In 2011, Jobs said , “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.”

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pesco-vegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options.

For nine months, Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple’s board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stock if word got out that the CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs’ confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure.

In 2004, Jobs had successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, Jobs disclosed little about his health in subsequent years.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs’ weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. Days later, he went on a six-month leave of absence.

In an email message to employees, Jobs said his “health-related issues are more complex” than he thought, then named Tim Cook , Apple’s then–chief operating officer, as “responsible for Apple’s day-today operations.”

After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event on September 9, 2009. He continued to serve as master of ceremonies, which included the unveiling of the iPad, throughout much of 2010.

In January 2011, Jobs announced he was going on medical leave. In August, he resigned as CEO of Apple, handing the reins to Cook.

Jobs died at age 56 in his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. His official cause of death was listed as respiratory arrest related to his years-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

The New York Times reported that in his final weeks, Jobs had become so weak that he struggled to walk up the stairs in his home. Still, he was able to say goodbye to some of his longtime colleagues, including Disney CEO Bob Iger; speak with his biographer; and offer advice to Apple executives about the unveiling of the iPhone 4S.

In a eulogy for Jobs , sister Mona Simpson wrote that just before dying, Jobs looked for a long time at his sister, Patty, then his wife and children, then past them, and said his last words: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

Jobs’ closest family and friends remembered him at a small gathering, then on October 16, a funeral for Jobs was held on the campus of Stanford University. Notable attendees included Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates ; singer Joan Baez , who once dated Jobs; former Vice President Al Gore ; actor Tim Allen; and News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch .

Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. Upon the release of the 2015 film Steve Jobs , fans traveled to the cemetery to find the site. Because the cemetery is not allowed to disclose the grave’s location, many left messages for Jobs in a memorial book instead.

Before his death, Jobs granted author and journalist Walter Isaacson permission to write his official biography. Jobs sat for more than 40 interviews with the Isaacson, who also talked to more than 100 of Jobs’ family, friends, and colleagues. Initially scheduled for a November 2011 release date, Steve Jobs hit shelves on October 24, just 19 days after Jobs died.

Jobs’ life has been the subject of two major films. The first, released in 2013, was simply titled Jobs and starred Ashton Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak told The Verge in 2013 he was approached about working on the film but couldn’t because, “I read a script as far as I could stomach it and felt it was crap.” Although he praised the casting, he told Gizmodo he felt his and Jobs’ personalities were inaccurately portrayed.

Instead, Wozniak worked with Sony Pictures on the second film, Steve Jobs , that was adapted from Isaacson’s biography and released in 2015. It starred Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Seth Rogen as Wozniak. Fassbender was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and co-star Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Apple and NeXT marketing executive Joanna Hoffman.

In 2015, filmmaker Alex Gibney examined Jobs’ life and legacy in the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine .

• Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world? [Jobs inviting an executive to join Apple]
• It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.
• In my perspective... science and computer science is a liberal art. It’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life.
• It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.
• 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.
• 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.
• I think humans are basically tool builders, and the computer is the most remarkable tool we’ve ever built.
• You just make the best product you can, and you don’t put it out until you feel it’s right.
• With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.
• Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
• I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates .
• If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
• 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.
• I like to believe there’s an afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn’t just disappear when you die, but somehow, it endures. But maybe it’s just like an on/off switch and click—and you’re gone. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.

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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

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.

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Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

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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.
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Chm Blog Remarkable People

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

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.

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.)

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).

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 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.

Homebrew Computer Club meeting, 1978 Courtesy of Lee Felsenstein

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

iPhone, 2007 CHM# 102716304 Photo: ©Mark Richards

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.

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.

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

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The Tweaker

By Malcolm Gladwell

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.’ ” ♦

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About The Author

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of  Time . He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

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• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 5, 2021)
• Length: 672 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982176860

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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.

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Why It Matters Who Steve Jobs Really Was

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

• Walter Isaacson

Reprint: R1204F

The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing.

In this essay Isaacson describes the 14 imperatives behind Jobs’s approach: focus; simplify; take responsibility end to end; when behind, leapfrog; put products before profits; don’t be a slave to focus groups; bend reality; impute; push for perfection; know both the big picture and the details; tolerate only “A” players; engage face-to-face; combine the humanities with the sciences; and “stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Six months after Jobs’s death, the author of his best-selling biography identifies the practices that every CEO can try to emulate.

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

• WI Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, is the author of Steve Jobs and of biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

15 Popular Books about Steve Jobs

• US History Books

No one can deny that Steve Jobs was a powerful and remarkable man. To celebrate his work, we put together a list of 15 must-read books about him.

This is an excellent reading list for anyone who wants to learn more about the late Apple co-founder and CEO.

We've included a variety of titles, from biographies to books that focus on his business methods.

So if you're looking for some inspiration or want to gain a deeper understanding of one of the most iconic entrepreneurs in history, be sure to check out this list!

1. Steve Jobs

Written by : Walter Isaacson

Published : 2011

Pages : 627

In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson offers an intimate and revealing portrait of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years and interviews with close family members, friends, and colleagues, this book is incredibly in-depth.

Isaacson paints a nuanced and compassionate picture of a complex and often contradictory man. Though Jobs could be fiercely demanding and even ruthless in pursuit of his vision, he was also capable of great warmth and kindness.

He had a profound impact not only on the technology industry but also on the world, and his legacy will continue to be felt for decades to come.

2. The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation

Written by : Jay Elliot, William L. Simon

Pages : 256

Jay Elliot and William L. Simon explores the late Apple CEO's unique approach to leadership. Elliot, who worked closely with Jobs for many years, provides insights into Job’s management style and the philosophy that guided his decision-making.

One of Jobs's leadership hallmarks was his willingness to take risks. He was not afraid to challenge the status quo or pursue bold new ideas, even when they met with resistance. This fearlessness was coupled with an unwavering commitment to quality and excellence.

Jobs wanted his products to be the best in the world, and he pushed his team to strive for improvement constantly. This combination of attributes helped Jobs create some of the most innovative pieces of technology in history.

3. The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs

Written by : Chrisann Brennan

Published : 2013

Pages : 320

Chrisann Brennan's memoir, The Bite in the Apple, chronicles her life with Steve Jobs. Brennan met Jobs when she was just seventeen, and the two had a child together out of wedlock. Jobs was always an unconventional thinker, and his relationship with Brennan was no different. He was often distant and dismissive, but he also lavished her with attention and gifts when it suited him.

Over the years, their relationship was marked by highs and lows, but it was always deeply intertwined with Jobs' work at Apple. As he rose to become one of the most influential figures in the tech world, Brennan remained a central part of his life, even as he married and started a family with someone else.

In her memoir, Brennan offers the best and the worst of how Jobs became who he was through many decades.

4. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything

Written by : Steven Levy

Published : 1994

Pages : 292

This book is a behind-the-scenes look at the development of the Apple Macintosh computer. The book chronicles the long and sometimes difficult journey from the early days of brainstorming and experimentation to the commercial success of the finished product.

Along the way, Levy interviews vital members of the team who brought the Mac to life, including co-founder Steve Jobs, engineer and programmer Steve Wozniak, and lesser-known people such as software engineer Bill Atkinson.

He also provides insights into the cutting-edge technology that made the Mac such a game-changer, including its graphical user interface and mouse-based input. With its fascinating insights and behind-the-scenes stories, Insanely Great is a must-read.

5. To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History

Written by : Lawrence Levy

Published : 2016

Pages : 272

To Pixar and Beyond is the story of how an unassuming lawyer ended up playing a pivotal role in the creation of one of the most successful animation studios of all time. In the early 1990s, Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and looking for a new challenge.

He found it in the form of computer animation, which was still in its infancy at the time. Jobs recruited Lawrence Levy to help him turn his vision into reality, and together they built Pixar from the ground up. Levy chronicles their journey in this fascinating book, offering insights into Jobs's creative process and detailing Pixar's innovative methods to become a storytelling powerhouse.

It is rather remarkable when you consider that this company almost failed and then grew to make movies such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo , and others.

6. Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography

Written by : Karen Blumenthal

Published : 2012

In her biography of Steve Jobs, Karen Blumenthal chronicles the life and career of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Job’s vision and creativity helped make Apple one of the most successful companies in the world. More than just Apple, it is often forgotten that he helped create Pixar.

Blumenthal does an excellent job tracing Job’s journey from his early days as a college dropout to his eventual return to Apple in the late 1990s.

Jobs once said that there are three stories for him, “the first is about connecting dots. The second is about love and loss. The third is about death.” This book does just that.

7. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

Written by : Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith

Published : 2006

Pages : 330

In his autobiography, iWoz , Steve Wozniak chronicles his incredible journey from tinkerer to tech visionary. Wozniak was always interested in technology, and as a child, he would take apart radios and TVs to see how they worked.

This led to a lifelong passion for electronics and computers. In the early 1970s, he began experimenting with building his own computer. His design was revolutionary, and it caught the attention of Steve Jobs. Together, they founded Apple Computer, and Wozniak's design became the basis for the first Apple computer.

The company went on to change the world, and Wozniak became a cult icon in the process. iWoz is an engaging and entertaining read that offers.

8. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

Written by : Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

Published : 2015

Pages : 464

When Brent Schlender set out to write a biography of Steve Jobs, he had a unique perspective. Not only had he known Jobs for 25 years, but he had also witnessed his transformation from a reckless upstart into a visionary leader.

In Becoming Steve Jobs , Schlender and Tetzeli provide readers with an intimate portrait of the late Apple co-founder. This includes information that Schlender got firsthand and interviews with others such as Tim Cook, John Lasseter, and others.

The book culminates with Jobs’ realizing that he must be more understanding and willing to let others make mistakes without brutal repercussions.

9. Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

Written by : Leander Kahney

Pages : 274

Jony Ive is the mastermind behind some of Apple's most iconic products, including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. A native of England Ive studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic before joining Apple in 1992.

In 1996, he was put in charge of the industrial design group, and it was during this time, he helped to develop the iMac, which was released in 1998. The following year, he worked on the first-generation iPod, and in 2007, he played a significant role in the development of the iPhone. He also was responsible for the design of the iPad.

He was primarily a behind-the-scenes character in the Apple story; he was knighted and named to the 2013 Time magazine Top 100 list.

10. The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success

Written by : Carmine Gallo

Published : 2010

One of Job’s favorite lines was “Think Different," which was at the heart of the late Apple co-founder's unique approach to innovation. Drawing on interviews with Jobs's colleagues, friends, and family and extensive research, Gallo reveals the seven principles that drove Jobs's success.

Some of these principles include "Do What You Love," "Create Insanely Great Experiences," and "Put a Dent in the Universe." By understanding and applying all seven of his principles, readers can unlock their potential for breakthrough success.

Gallo shows that he believed that anyone could be a game-changer if they set their mind to it, an attitude that helped him conquer the computer world even though he wasn’t a programmer.

11. Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made

Written by : Andy Hertzfeld with a foreword by Steve Wozniak

Published : 2004

Pages : 291

Revolution in The Valley is the story of how the Apple Macintosh was created, told by one of the key figures behind its development, Andy Hertzfeld. He vividly describes the intense collaboration and creative ferment that characterized the Mac team during its formative years, resulting in a computer that changed the world.

From early prototypes to the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, he chronicles the ups and downs of one of the most turbulent periods in Apple's history, providing insights into the design process and personalities that made the Macintosh such a groundbreaking achievement.

He offers a unique insider's view of how a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. Along the way, he debunks many of the myths surrounding Mac's development. This book also includes illustrations and photos from the times.

12. Inside Steve's Brain

Published : 2008

Pages : 294

Kahney had reported on Jobs for over a decade and followed him through ups and downs. Instead of describing his character, which everyone knows how it almost seemed bipolar depending on what you accomplished, she goes into specifics.

An example of this is that he was known to fire staff in elevators since he didn't want to waste time. He took credit for others' work, as is evident with how Steve Wozniak became almost a side story even though he created the Apple computer. He thought that the masses were idiots, so he made technology that any person could use.

Finally, he believed in Buddhist ideals of treating everyone equally and with care, but then allowed his technology to be made in China under horrible conditions. He was a bundle of contradictions, to say the least.

13. iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business

Written by : Jeffrey S. Young, William L. Simon

Published : 2005

Pages : 359

If you are looking for a book that praises Jobs throughout, this is not the one for you. It isn't a hit job in any way, but it delves into numerous issues that others ignore. This book traces Jobs from the beginning until before Apple launched the iPhone and iPad.

It was written before he died; it does go into his usual ups and downs with others because of his ego. However, it also goes into his creation of NeXT and then Pixar. Seeing how he worked with John Lasseter of Pixar is very intriguing.

This alone is interesting enough to read the book.

14. Small Fry: A Memoir

Written by : Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Published : 2018

Pages : 383

Lisa Brennan-Jobs' memoir, Small Fry, offers a rare glimpse into the childhood of one of the most influential figures in the tech industry.

The daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Jobs denied that she was his child, and only after DNA testing did he finally admit it, although still not publicly. Even though she was Job’s daughter, her childhood was anything but privileged. She writes candidly about her complicated relationship with her father and how his often absentee parenting left her feeling isolated and alone even when she moved in with him.

Despite her challenges, Brennan-Jobs went on to have a successful career in her own right, and her memoir is a moving tribute to her resilience and determination.

15. Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

Written by : Ken Kocienda

Pages : 264

Ken Kocienda's Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of Apple during the years when Jobs was at the helm.

Kocienda, who worked as a software engineer on the original iPhone team, provides an inside look at how Apple's design process works, from concept to completion. He also discusses how Jobs' unique vision and leadership style helped create some of Apple's most iconic products, including the iPhone and iPad.

Kocienda's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Apple or the design process behind consumer electronics.

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Steve Jobs revealed one of his biggest life regrets in final days before he died

Tech legend steve jobs died back in 2011.

Jess Battison

Let’s be real for a minute, as much as you might think you’re totally care-free and live for the moment, you probably have at least one thing you regret in life.

From a tattoo to what you ate for dinner last night, your regrets probably change over time with a bunch of people aged between 70-80 recently agreeing their biggest one was worrying over money when they were young.

And in the final days before he died, Steve Jobs revealed one of his biggest life regrets. The former Apple CEO and co-founder died in 2011 following a 2003 cancer diagnosis.

Leaving behind his legacy in technology and innovation, the 56-year-old also left four children: Lisa, 45, Reed, 32, Erin, 28, and Eve, 25.

It was around his family that the tech legend held regret as he spoke of his kids in an interview.

In the weeks leading up to his death, he spoke with author Walter Isaacson to collaborate on a comprehensive biography in the hope to offer insights into his life to his children.

“I wanted my kids to know me,” Jobs said to Isaacson. “I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

He hoped the biography would explain his absences to his kids and help them to understand the choices he made. With Jobs’ huge professional success, there was of course a struggle to balance that with his family responsibilities.

Well-reported, Jobs initially legally denied paternity of Lisa for several years before they eventually reconciled. During the period before he accepted being her father, Lisa and her mum lived on government assistance.

An early Apple business computer is actually named after her, the Apple Lisa.

Eve previously spoke to Vanity Fair about the one memento of her late dad that nobody else can lay claim to .

While she called the iPhone a ‘beautiful reminder every day’, she also has some quirkier merchandise like vintage t-shirts.

And that includes a one-of-a-kind from the Computer 1 era, likely made by her dad when Apple was still being run from his garage in the mid to late 70s. On the front, the t-shirt alludes to an infamous Biblical character: "Eve had the right idea," it reads.

On the back, the text continues: "She picked an Apple."

Eve said of the sentimental shirt: "It means so much to me. I smile every time I wear it."

Topics:  Apple , Technology , Parenting

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

@ jessbattison_

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Steve Sloan, former Alabama All-American QB and athletics director, dies at 79

Steve Sloan, the former Alabama football quarterback and athletics director, died Sunday in Orlando, Florida at the age of 79, according to an obituary written by Wayne Atcheson, a former UA sports information director.

Sloan spent the past three months in memory care. He died at Orlando Health Dr. P. Phillips Hospital with his wife, Brenda, by his side.

Born in Austin, Texas, Sloan was an All-American and two-time national champion at Alabama. He became the SEC MVP in 1965 and was named the best college quarterback with the Sammy Baugh Trophy in 1966.

Sloan served as the backup quarterback to Joe Namath to begin Sloan's time at Alabama, so Sloan played defensive back to start. But when Namath was suspended for the 1964 Sugar Bowl, Sloan filled in and led Alabama to a 12-7 victory. The next two seasons, Alabama won national championships. The first, Sloan was a backup to Namath and filled in when Namath was injured. Then the next season, Sloan became a captain and led the Crimson Tide to another national championship, with a victory over Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. Sloan was named MVP of that game.

During his time at Alabama, Sloan was also a founding member of Alabama Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

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After Sloan's playing career at UA, the Atlanta Falcons drafted him, and he played two seasons as a backup. Then he went back to Tuscaloosa and began his coaching career. He joined the Alabama staff from 1968-70. He was also golf coach in 1969.

After two offensive coordinator stints, first at Florida State then Georgia Tech, Sloan became the coach of Vanderbilt at 27. In 1974, Sloan was named SEC coach of the year after leading the Commodores to their first bowl game in almost 20 years.

He later became the coach of Texas Tech, where he received Southwest Conference Coach of the Year in 1976, before Ole Miss hired him as coach from 1978-1982. His last head coaching gig was at Duke, where he worked from 1983-1986.

Sloan then transitioned to becoming an administrator. He started at Alabama, where he served as athletics director from 1987-1989. During that time, Sloan launched the donation program "Tide Pride" which still exists to this day.

After his stint at UA, he became athletics director at North Texas, Central Florida and Chattanooga, until he retired in 2006.

Among his career accomplishments, Sloan was inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame (2000) and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame (2003). He also played in the U.S. Senior Open at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Sloan was also selected to receive the Paul W. Bryant alumni-athlete award in 2019.

Sloan is preceded in death by his son Jonathan, parents C.L. "Preacher" and Virginia Byrd Sloan and stepmother Samye Jean Phillips Sloan. He is survived by his wife Brenda Faw Sloan, to whom he was married for 55 years, and his son, Stephen Jr. of Lima, Peru.

Funeral arrangements for Steve Sloan

The funeral will be held on Thursday, April 18 at St. Luke's Methodist Church in Orlando, Florida, per Atcheson. Visitation will be at 1 p.m. ET and the service will start at 2 p.m. The church will live stream the service.

Sloan will be buried in his hometown, Cleveland, Tennessee in the Hillcrest Memorial Gardens Cemetery.

Nick Kelly is the Alabama beat writer for The Tuscaloosa News, part of the USA TODAY Network, and he covers Alabama football and men's basketball. Reach him at [email protected] or follow him  @_NickKelly  on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter .