biography for steve jobs

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.
• A History of Apple Computers
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Steve Jobs Hardcover – Big Book, October 24, 2011

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• Print length 656 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date October 24, 2011
• Dimensions 6.13 x 2.2 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1451648537
• ISBN-13 978-1451648539
• Lexile measure 1080L
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Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Walter Isaacson

Q: It's becoming well known that Jobs was able to create his Reality Distortion Field when it served him. Was it difficult for you to cut through the RDF and get beneath the narrative that he created? How did you do it?

Isaacson: Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Steve on the original Macintosh team, said that even if you were aware of his Reality Distortion Field, you still got caught up in it. But that is why Steve was so successful: He willfully bent reality so that you became convinced you could do the impossible, so you did. I never felt he was intentionally misleading me, but I did try to check every story. I did more than a hundred interviews. And he urged me not just to hear his version, but to interview as many people as possible. It was one of his many odd contradictions: He could distort reality, yet he was also brutally honest most of the time. He impressed upon me the value of honesty, rather than trying to whitewash things.

Q: How were the interviews with Jobs conducted? Did you ask lots of questions, or did he just talk?

Isaacson: I asked very few questions. We would take long walks or drives, or sit in his garden, and I would raise a topic and let him expound on it. Even during the more formal sessions in his living room, I would just sit quietly and listen. He loved to tell stories, and he would get very emotional, especially when talking about people in his life whom he admired or disdained.

Q: He was a powerful man who could hold a grudge. Was it easy to get others to talk about Jobs willingly? Were they afraid to talk?

Isaacson: Everyone was eager to talk about Steve. They all had stories to tell, and they loved to tell them. Even those who told me about his rough manner put it in the context of how inspiring he could be.

Q: Jobs embraced the counterculture and Buddhism. Yet he was a billionaire businessman with his own jet. In what way did Jobs' contradictions contribute to his success?

Isaacson: Steve was filled with contradictions. He was a counterculture rebel who became a billionaire. He eschewed material objects yet made objects of desire. He talked, at times, about how he wrestled with these contradictions. His counterculture background combined with his love of electronics and business was key to the products he created. They combined artistry and technology.

Q: Jobs could be notoriously difficult. Did you wind up liking him in the end?

Isaacson: Yes, I liked him and was inspired by him. But I knew he could be unkind and rough. These things can go together. When my book first came out, some people skimmed it quickly and cherry-picked the examples of his being rude to people. But that was only half the story. Fortunately, as people read the whole book, they saw the theme of the narrative: He could be petulant and rough, but this was driven by his passion and pursuit of perfection. He liked people to stand up to him, and he said that brutal honesty was required to be part of his team. And the teams he built became extremely loyal and inspired.

Q: Do you believe he was a genius?

Isaacson: He was a genius at connecting art to technology, of making leaps based on intuition and imagination. He knew how to make emotional connections with those around him and with his customers.

Q: Did he have regrets?

Isaacson: He had some regrets, which he expressed in his interviews. For example, he said that he did not handle well the pregnancy of his first girlfriend. But he was deeply satisfied by the creativity he ingrained at Apple and the loyalty of both his close colleagues and his family.

Q: What do you think is his legacy?

Isaacson: His legacy is transforming seven industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, digital publishing, and retail stores. His legacy is creating what became the most valuable company on earth, one that stood at the intersection of the humanities and technology, and is the company most likely still to be doing that a generation from now. His legacy, as he said in his "Think Different" ad, was reminding us that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Photo credit: Patrice Gilbert Photography

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (October 24, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 656 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1451648537
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1451648539
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1080L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 2.2 x 9.25 inches
• #7 in Computer & Technology Biographies
• #10 in Computing Industry History
• #101 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

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About the author

Walter isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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Biography Online

Steve Jobs Biography

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

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

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

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

Steve Jobs in India

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

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

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

Steve Jobs and Apple

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

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

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

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

Life After Apple

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Photo Joi Ito

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

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

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

Return to Apple

Photo: Matt Buchanan

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

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

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

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

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

– Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek (25 May 1998)

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Steve Jobs

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

Personal life

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

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

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

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

Quote in Biography by Walter Isaacson.

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

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

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

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

• January 20, 2019 7:27 AM

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

• January 16, 2019 5:29 PM

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

• December 19, 2018 2:19 PM

Steve job amazing man

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

I agree 100%.

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

Very nice biography

• September 04, 2018 12:47 PM

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

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

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Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple

Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was published Monday, less than three weeks after Job's death on Oct. 5.

When Steve Jobs was 6 years old, his young next door neighbor found out he was adopted. "That means your parents abandoned you and didn't want you," she told him.

Jobs ran into his home, where his adoptive parents reassured him that he was theirs and that they wanted him.

"[They said] 'You were special, we chose you out, you were chosen," says biographer Walter Isaacson. "And that helped give [Jobs] a sense of being special. ... For Steve Jobs, he felt throughout his life that he was on a journey — and he often said, 'The journey was the reward.' But that journey involved resolving conflicts about ... his role in this world: why he was here and what it was all about."

When Jobs died on Oct. 5 from complications of pancreatic cancer, many people felt a sense of personal loss for the Apple co-founder and former CEO. Jobs played a key role in the creation of the Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad — innovative devices and technologies that people have integrated into their daily lives.

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Jobs detailed how he created those products — and how he rose through the world of Silicon Valley, competed with Google and Microsoft, and helped transform popular culture — in a series of extended interviews with Isaacson, the president of The Aspen Institute and the author of biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. The two men met more than 40 times throughout 2009 and 2010, often in Jobs' living room. Isaacson also conducted more than 100 interviews with Jobs' colleagues, relatives, friends and adversaries.

His biography tells the story of how Jobs revolutionized the personal computer. It also tells Jobs' personal story — from his childhood growing up in Mountain View, Calif., to his lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism to his relationship with family and friends.

In his last meetings with Isaacson, Jobs shifted the conversation to his thoughts regarding religion and death.

"I remember sitting in the back garden on a sunny day [on a day when] he was feeling bad, and he talked about whether or not he believed in an afterlife," Isaacson tells Fresh Air 's Terry Gross. "He said, 'Sometimes I'm 50-50 on whether there's a God. It's the great mystery we never quite know. But 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."

Jobs paused for a second, remembers Isaacson.

"And then he says, 'But maybe it's just like an on/off switch and click — and you're gone.' And then he paused for another second and he smiled and said, 'Maybe that's why I didn't like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.' "

'The Depth Of The Simplicity'

Jobs' attention to detail on his creations was unrivaled, says Isaacson. Though he was a technologist and a businessman, he was also an artist and designer.

"[He] connected art with technology," explains Isaacson. "[In his products,] he obsessed over the color of the screws, over the finish of the screws — even the screws you couldn't see." Even with the original Macintosh, he made sure that the circuit board's chips were lined up properly and looked good. He made them go back and redo the circuit board. He made them find the right color, find the right curves on the screw. Even the curves on the machine — he wanted it to feel friendly.

That obsessiveness occasionally drove his Apple co-workers crazy — but it also made them fiercely loyal, says Isaacson.

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Steve Jobs: 'Computer Science Is A Liberal Art'

"It's one of the dichotomies about Jobs: He could be demanding and tough and irate. On the other hand, he got all A-players and they became fanatically loyal to him," says Isaacson. "Why? They realized they were producing, with other A-players, truly great products for an artist who was a perfectionist — and wasn't always the kindest person when they failed — but he was rallying them to do great stuff."

He relays one story about Jobs that shows, he says, how much he was able to connect great ideas and innovations together. In the early 1980s, Jobs visited Xerox PARC, a research company in Palo Alto that had invented the laser printer, object-oriented programming and the Ethernet. Jobs noticed that the computers running at PARC all featured graphics on their desktops that allowed users to click icons and folders. This was new at the time: Most computers used text prompts and a text interface.

"Steve Jobs made an arrangement with Xerox and he took that concept [of the graphical user interface] and he improved it a hundred-fold," says Isaacson. "He made it so you could drag and drop some of the folders; he invented the pull-down menus. ... So what he was able to do was to take a conception and turn it into a reality."

That's where Jobs' genius was, Isaacson says. Jobs insisted that the software and hardware on Apple products needed to be fully integrated for the best user experience. It was not a great business model at first.

"Microsoft, which licensed itself promiscuously to all sorts of manufacturers, ends up with 90 to 95 percent all the operating system market by the beginning of 2000," says Isaacson. "But in the long run, the end-to-end integration system works very well for Apple and for Steve Jobs. Because it allows him to create devices [like the iPod and iPad] that just work beautifully with the machines."

Isaacson says working with Jobs gave him an additional insight into the design of Jobs' products.

"I see the depth of the simplicity," he says. "[I appreciate] the intuitive nature of the design, and how he would repeatedly sit there with his design engineers and his user-interface software people, and say, 'No, no no, I want to make it simpler.' I also appreciate the beauty of the parts unseen. His father taught him that the back of a fence or the back of a chest of drawers should be as beautiful as the front because [he] would know the craftsmanship that went into it. So somehow, it comes through — the depth of the beauty of the design."

Jobs was a perfectionist with a famously mercurial temperament. He was an artist and a visionary who "could be demanding and tough and irate," says Isaacson.

Interview Highlights

On what Jobs thought of the Microsoft operating system

Isaacson: "When it first came out — I can't use the words on the air — but [Jobs thought it was] clunky and not beautiful and not aesthetic. But as always is the case with Microsoft, it improves. And eventually Microsoft made a graphical operating system — Windows — and each new version got better until it was a dominating operating system."

On the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates

Hear Steve Jobs On Fresh Air

Listen to steve jobs' 1996 conversation with terry gross.

Isaacson: "There are all sorts of lawsuits where Apple is trying to sue Microsoft for Windows, for trying to steal the look and feel. Apple loses most of the suits but they drag on and there's even a government investigation. By the time Steve Jobs comes back to Apple in 1997, the relationship is horrible. 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 — both rivalry and partnership."

On the relationship between Jobs and Google

Isaacson: "I think there was an unnerving historic resonance for what had happened a couple of decades earlier [with Microsoft]. Suddenly you have Google taking the operating system of the iPhone and mobile devices and all of the touch-screen technologies and building upon it, and making it an open technology that various device makers could use. ... Steve Jobs felt very possessive about all of the look, the feel, the swipes, the multitouch gestures that you use — and was driven to absolute distraction when Android's operating system, developed by Google and used by hardware manufacturers, started doing the exact same thing. ... He was furious but that probably understates his feeling. He was really furious and he let Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, know it."

Walter Isaacson is president and CEO of The Aspen Institute. His other books include Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin : An American Life , and Kissinger: A Biography .

More With Walter Isaacson

Einstein: relatively speaking, a complicated life, walter isaacson on benjamin franklin.

On Jobs' adoptive parents

Isaacson: "When Steve got placed with [parents who were not college graduates], his biological mother initially balked at first but ... the Jobs family made a pledge that they would start a college fund and make sure that Steve went to college."

On approaching Isaacson to write his biography

Isaacson: "It was 2004 and he had broached the subject of doing a biography of him and I thought, 'Well, this guy's in the midst of an up-and-down career and he has maybe 20 years to go, so I said to him, 'I'd love to do a biography of you but let's wait 20 or so years until you retire.' Then off and on after 2004, we would be in touch. ...

"I finally talked to his wife, who was very good at understanding his legacy, and she said, 'If you're going to do a book on Steve, you can't just keep saying, 'I'll do it in 20 years or so.' You really ought to do it now.' This was 2009. Steve Jobs, that year, had had a liver transplant and I realized how sick he was. ... And so, that was when I realized that this was a very fascinating tale and this guy may or may not make it. I thought he was going to live much longer. But at the very least, he was facing the prospect of his mortality so it was time for him to be reflective and do a book."

On his final meeting with Jobs

Isaacson: "He was pretty sick. He was confined to the house. And he said to me, at the end of our long conversation, 'There will be things in this book I don't like, right?' And I said, 'Yes.' Partly because you can interview people right after a meeting they've had with Steve Jobs [and] you interview five people and get five different stories about what happened. ... People have different perceptions of who he is. ...

"He said, 'I'll make you this promise. I'm not going to read the book until next year, until after it comes out.' And it made me feel a grand emotion, of 'Oh! That's great. Steve is going to be alive for another year.' Because when you're around him, the power of his thinking really grabs you. I remember leaving his house and thinking, 'Oh, I'm so relieved. He'll be alive in a year. He just told me so.' Logically, I should have said, 'He doesn't know what ups and downs he's going to have with his health.' But I think that he always felt some miracle would come along because all of his life, miracles had come along."

• Born February 24 , 1955 · San Francisco, California, USA
• Died October 5 , 2011 · Palo Alto, California, USA (pancreatic cancer)
• Birth name Steven Paul Jobs
• Height 6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
• Steven Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California, to students Abdul Fattah Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble who were unmarried at the time and gave him up for adoption. He was taken in by a working class couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, and grew up with them in Mountain View, California. He attended Homestead High School in Cupertino California and went to Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1972 but dropped out after only one semester, staying on to "drop in" on courses that interested him. He took a job with video game manufacturer Atari to raise enough money for a trip to India and returned from there a Buddhist. Back in Cupertino he returned to Atari where his old friend Steve Wozniak was still working. Wozniak was building his own computer and in 1976 Jobs pre-sold 50 of the as-yet unmade computers to a local store and managed to buy the components on credit solely on the strength of the order, enabling them to build the Apple I without any funding at all. The Apple II followed in 1977 and the company Apple Computer was formed shortly afterwards. The Apple II was credited with starting the personal computer boom, its popularity prompting IBM to hurriedly develop their own PC. By the time production of the Apple II ended in 1993 it had sold over 6 million units. Inspired by a trip to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), engineers from Apple began working on a commercial application for the graphical interface ideas they had seen there. The resulting machine, Lisa, was expensive and never achieved any level of commercial success, but in 1984 another Apple computer, using the same WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface concept, was launched. An advert during the 1984 Super Bowl, directed by Ridley Scott introduced the Macintosh computer to the world (in fact, the advert had been shown on a local TV channel in Idaho on 31 December 1983 and in movie theaters during January 1984 before its famous "premiere" on 22 January during the Super Bowl). In 1985 Jobs was fired from Apple and immediately founded another computer company, NeXT. Its machines were not a commercial success but some of the technology was later used by Apple when Jobs eventually returned there. In the meantime, in 1986, Jobs bought The Computer Graphics Group from Lucasfilm. The group was responsible for making high-end computer graphics hardware but under its new name, Pixar, it began to produce innovative computer animations. Their first title under the Pixar name, Luxo Jr. (1986) won critical and popular acclaim and in 1991 Pixar signed an agreement with Disney, with whom it already had a relationship, to produce a series of feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995) . In 1996 Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple, becoming its CEO. With the help of British-born industrial designer Jonathan Ive , Jobs brought his own aesthetic philosophy back to the ailing company and began to turn its fortunes around with the release of the iMac in 1998. The company's MP3 player, the iPod, followed in 2001, with the iPhone launching in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. The company's software music player, iTunes, evolved into an online music (and eventually also movie and software application) store, helping to popularize the idea of "legally" downloading entertainment content. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery in 2004. Despite the success of this operation he became increasingly ill and received a liver transplant in 2009. He returned to work after a six month break but eventually resigned his position in August 2011 after another period of medical leave which began in January 2011. He died on 5 October 2011. - IMDb Mini Biography By: IMDb Editors
• Spouse Laurene Powell-Jobs (March 18, 1991 - October 5, 2011) (his death, 3 children)
• Children Lisa Brennan-Jobs Eve Jobs
• Relatives Mona Simpson (Sibling)
• Black turtleneck sweatshirt and blue jeans - he owned over a hundred
• CEO of Pixar Animation Studios
• Has a daughter, Lisa, from a previous relationship. She is the namesake of Apple's computer, the Lisa.
• When Apple Computer appointed its first Board of Directors, they insisted that all employees wear name badges with a number indicating the order in which they were hired. They assigned Steve Wozniak , who did all the engineering of the highly successful Apple II computer, the title Employee No. 1. Steve Jobs was officially Employee No. 2. He protested, but the board refused to change the badge assignments. Jobs offered a compromise: He would be Employee No. 0, since 0 comes before 1 on the mathematical model known as a number line.
• CEO of Pixar Animation Studios - the creators of Toy Story (1995) , A Bug's Life (1998) , Toy Story 2 (1999) , Monsters, Inc. (2001) , and Finding Nemo (2003) - as well as various shorts, including Oscar-winning Tin Toy (1988) , Geri's Game (1997) , and For the Birds (2000) .
• In Forbes Magazine's listing of the 400 Richest Americans in 2005, Steve Jobs came in at number 67 with a total worth of $3.3 Billion.
• [February 1985, interview in "Playboy" magazine] I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying.
• [1985] I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and then the thread of Apple weave in and out, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.
• [2003] There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television--but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
• [1998] A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
• Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

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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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History of Apple: The story of Steve Jobs and the company he founded

In this feature we tell the story of Apple. We start with the early days, the tale of how Apple was founded, moving on through the Apple I, to the Apple II, the launch of the Macintosh and the revolution in the DTP industry… To the tech-industry behemoth that we know and love today.

So sit back as we take a stroll down memory lane. Why not brush up on what really happened before you go and watch the Steve Jobs movie , with its interesting interpretations of several important events in the company’s history?

On 1 April 1976 Apple was founded, making the company 41 years old as of the 1 April 2017 – here’s a historical breakdown of the company.

The history of Apple

Our Apple history feature includes information about The foundation of Apple and the years that followed, we look at How Jobs met Woz and Why Apple was named Apple. The Apple I and The debut of the Apple II. Apple’s visit to Xerox, and the one-button mouse. The story of The Lisa versus the Macintosh. Apple’s ‘1984’ advert, directed by Ridley Scott. The Macintosh and the DTP revolution. Read more: The Mac’s Birthday .

We go on to examine what happened between Jobs and Sculley, leading to Jobs departure from Apple, and what happened during The wilderness years: when Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple, including Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise and how Apple teamed up with IBM and Motorola and eventually Microsoft. And finally, The return of Jobs to Apple.

The foundation of Apple

The history of everyone’s favourite start-up is a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

The two Steves –  Jobs and Wozniak  – may have been Apple’s most visible founders, but were it not for their friend Ronald Wayne there might be no iPhone , iPad or iMac today. Jobs convinced him to take 10% of the company stock and act as an arbiter should he and Woz come to blows, but Wayne backed out 12 days later, selling for just $500 a holding that would have been worth $72bn 40 years later.

How Jobs met Woz

Jobs and Woz (that’s Steve Wozniak) were introduced in 1971 by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, who went on to become one of Apple’s earliest employees. The two Steves got along thanks to their shared love of technology and pranks.

Jobs and Wozniak joined forces, initially coming up with pranks such as rigging up a painting of a hand showing the middle-finger to be displayed during a graduaction ceremony at Jobs’ school, and a call to the Vatican that nearly got them access to the Pope.

The two friends were also using their technology know-how to build ‘blue boxes’ that made it possible to make long distance phone calls for free.

Jobs and Wozniak worked together on the Atari arcade game Breakout while Jobs was working at Atari and Wozniak was working at HP – Jobs had roped Woz into helping him reduce the number of logic chips required. Jobs managed to get a good bonus for the work on Breakout, of which he gave a small amount to Woz.

The first Apple computer

The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California’s Menlo Park from 1975. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there – which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards – and was inspired by MITS’ build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. This philosophy continues to shine through in Apple’s products today.

So Woz produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn’t trying to change the world with what he’d produced – he just wanted to show off how much he’d managed to do with so few resources.

Speaking to NPR (National Public Radio) in 2006, Woz explained that “When I built this Apple I… the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter – it should have a keyboard – and the output device is a TV set, it wasn’t really to show the world [that] here is the direction [it] should go [in]. It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer.”

Jobs and Woz

It almost didn’t happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger-than-life personality – he’s funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars – but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, “I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers.” He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss.

Let’s be thankful he didn’t. Jobs saw Woz’s computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator (which cost a bit more than calculators do today!), and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.

Why Apple was named Apple

The name Apple was to cause Apple problems in later years as it was uncomfortably similar to that of the Beatles’ publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough.

Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984 , Woz credited Jobs with the idea. “He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned.”

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name was conceived by Jobs after he returned from apple farm. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

The name also likely benefitted by beginning with an A, which meant it would be nearer the front of any listings.

The Apple Logo

There are other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple. The idea that it was named thus because Newton was inspired when an Apple fell out of a tree hitting him on the head, is backed up by the fact that the original Apple logo was a rather complicated illustration of Newton sitting under a tree.

Later the company settled on the bite out of an Apple design for Apple’s logo – a far simpler logo design. These logos are probably the reason for other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple, with some suggesting that the Apple logo with a chunk taken out of it is a nod at computer scientist and Enigma code-breaker, Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating a cyanide infused apple.

However, according to Rob Janoff , the designer who created the logo, the Turing connection is simply “ a wonderful urban legend.”

Equally the bite taken out of the Apple could represent the story of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament. The idea being that the Apple represents knowledge.

Selling the Apple I

Woz built each computer by hand, and although he’d wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts – at a price at that would recoup their outlay as long as they shipped 50 units – Jobs had bigger ideas.

Jobs inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View to supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. This meant that once the store had taken its cut, the Apple I sold for $666.66 – the legend is that Wozniak liked repeating numbers and was unaware of the ‘number of the beast’ conection. 

Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn’t exist in any great numbers, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn’t have the resources to fulfil the order. Neither could it get them. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend’s father, it wasn’t enough.

In the end, it was Byte Shop’s purchase order that sealed the deal. Jobs took it to Cramer Electronics and, as Walter Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography , he convinced Cramer’s manager to call Paul Terrell, owner of Byte Shop, to verify the order.

“Terrell was at a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit.”

An original Apple I (in a case)

Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it’s ultimately this that saw him duck out.

“Jobs and Woz didn’t have two nickels to rub together,”  Wayne told NextShark in 2013 . “If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. Was I reachable? Yes.”

Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they’d been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found.

As Michael Moritz explains in Return to the Little Kingdom , “Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn’t even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple I didn’t have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn’t be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn’t provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. It had no case.”

An original Apple I board, from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum collection

Raspberry PI and the BBC’s Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn’t accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, “Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.” The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units.

Their scarcity has made them collectors’ items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000. If your pockets aren’t that deep, Briel Computers’  Replica 1 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.

When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard-of rates of growth – so much so that the decision to build a successor can’t have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.

The Apple II

The success of the first Apple computer meant that Apple was able to go on to design its predecessor.

The Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like the Apple computer before it, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time.

Yes, the Apple II (or apple ][ as it was styled) was a true innovation, and one that Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson , credits with launching the personal computer industry.

The trouble is, the specs alone weren’t really enough to justify the $1,300 cost of the Apple II. Business users needed a reason to dip into their IT budgets and it wasn’t until some months later that the perfect excuse presented itself: the world’s first ‘killer app’.

The first app on an Apple computer: Visicalc

Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin was a student at Harvard Business School when he visualised  “a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image [of a table of numbers] hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations…”

Of course, we’d recognise that as a spreadsheet today, but back in the late 1970s, such things existed only on paper. Converting them for digital use would be no small feat, but Bricklin was unperturbed. He borrowed an Apple II from his eventual publisher and set to work, knocking out an alpha edition over the course of a weekend.

Many of the concepts he used are still familiar today – in particular, letters above each column and numbers by the rows to use as references when building formulae. (Wondering how it compares to Numbers today? Here’s our Numbers review .)

The technological limitations inherent in the hardware meant that it didn’t quite work as Bricklin had first imagined. The Apple II didn’t have an incorporated display and although the mouse had been invented it wasn’t bundled with the machine. So, the display became the regular screen, and the mouse was swapped out for the Apple II’s game paddle, which Bricklin described as being “a dial you could turn to move game objects back and forth… you could move the cursor left or right, and then push the ‘fire’ button, and then turning the paddle would move the cursor up and down.”

It was far from perfect and working this way was sluggish, so Bricklin reverted to using the left and right arrow keys, with the space bar in place of the fire button for switching between horizontal and vertical movement.

VisiCalc was unveiled in 1979 and described as “a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations”. We owe it a debt of gratitude for the part it played in driving sales of the Apple II and anchoring Apple within the industry.

Writing in Morgan Stanley’s Electronics Letter , shortly before its launch, analyst Benjamin M Rosen expounded his belief that VisiCalc was “so powerful, convenient, universal, simple to use and reasonably priced that it could well become one of the largest-selling personal computer programs ever… [it] could some day become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.”

How right he was, as Tim Barry revealed in a later InfoWorld piece in which he described an experience that would have been familiar to many:

“When I first used VisiCalc on an Apple II, I wanted to get a version that could take advantage of the larger system capabilities of my CP/M computer. Alas it was not to be… We ended up buying an Apple II just to run VisiCalc (a fairly common reason for many Apple sales, I’m told).”

Apple itself credited the app with being behind a fifth of all series IIs it sold.

Apple II success: colour graphics

So a piece of software worth a little more than $100 was selling a piece of hardware worth ten times as much. That was uncharted territory, but even with the right software the Apple II wouldn’t have been a success if it hadn’t adhered to the company’s already established high standards.

The February 1984 edition of PC Mag , looking back at the Apple II in the context of what it had taught IBM, put some of its success down to the fact that “its packaging did not make it look like a ham radio operator’s hobby. A low heat-generating switching power supply allowed the computer to be placed in a lightweight plastic case. Its sophisticated packaging differentiated it from … computers that had visible boards and wires connecting various components to the motherboard.”

More radically, though, the Apple II  “was the first of its type to provide usable colo[u]r graphics… contained expansion slots for which other hardware manufacturers could design devices that could be installed into the computer to perform functions that Apple has never even considered.”

In short, Apple had designed a computer that embodied what we came to expect of desktop machines through the 1980s, 1990s and the first few years of this century – before Apple turned things on its head again and moved increasingly towards sealed boxes without the option for internal expansion.

Almost six million series IIs were produced over 16 years, giving Apple its second big hit. Really, though, the company was still getting started, and its brightest days were still ahead.

For VisiCalc, the future wasn’t so bright, largely because its developers weren’t quick enough to address the exploding PC market. Rival Lotus stepped in and its 1-2-3 quickly became the business standard. It bought Software Arts, VisiCalc’s developer, in 1985 and remained top dog until Microsoft did to it what Lotus had done to VisiCalc – it usurped it with a rival that established a new digital order.

That rival was Excel which, like VisiCalc, appeared on an Apple machine long before it was ported to the PC.

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Apple, Xerox and the one-button mouse

Apple has never been slow to innovate – except, perhaps, where product names are concerned. We’re approaching the eighties in our trip through the company’s history and we’re at the point where it’s followed up the Apple I and II with the III. Predictable, eh?

The two Steves founded the company with a trend-bucking debut and had the gumption to target the industry’s biggest names with its two follow ups. That must have left industry watchers wondering where it might go next.

The answer, it turned out, was Palo Alto.

Xerox had established a research centre there – Xerox PARC, now simply called ‘parc’ – where it was free to explore new technologies a long way from the corporate base on the opposite side of the country. Its work helped drive forward the tech that we still use every day, such as optical media, Ethernet and laser printers (we aren’t just talking about photocopiers!) Of most interest to Mac users, though, is its revolutionary work on interface design.

The Apple I,  II and III computers were text-based machines, much like the earliest IBM PCs. But Jobs, who was working on the Lisa at the time, wanted something more intuitive. He convinced Xerox to grant three days’ access to PARC for him and a number of Apple employees. In exchange Xerox won the right to buy 100,000 Apple shares at $10 each.

To say this was a bargain would be a massive understatement. Apple has split its stock four times since then – in 1987, 2000, 2005 and 2014. Companies do this when the price of a single share starts to get too high, in an effort to stimulate further trading. So, assuming Xerox held on to those shares, it would have had 200,000 by 1987, 400,000 by 2000 and 800,000 by 2005. The split in 2014 was rated at seven to one, so Xerox’s holding would leap from 800,000 to 5.6m. Selling them at today’s prices would rake in $708m (£450m). Not bad for a three-day tour.

Jobs was bowled over by the Xerox Alto, a machine used widely throughout the park, with a portrait display and graphical interface, which was way ahead of its time. It had been knocking around for a while by then, but Xerox, which built 2000 units, hadn’t been selling it to the public. It wasn’t small – about the size of an under-counter fridge – but it was still considered a ‘personal’ machine, which was driven home by the user-centric manner in which it was used. It was the first computer to major on mouse use, with a three-button gadget used to point at and click on objects on the screen.

Jobs decreed that every computer Apple produced from that point on should adopt a similar way of working. Speaking to Walter Isaacson some years later, he described the revelation as “like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

The Lisa and the Macintosh

It kicked off a race inside Apple between the teams developing the Lisa and the Macintosh.

Jeff Raskin

The official line at the time was that Lisa stood for Local Integrated System Architecture, and the fact it was Jobs’ daughter’s name was purely coincidental. It was a high-end business machine slated to sell at close to $10,000. Convert that to today’s money and it would buy you a mid-range family car. The project was managed by John Couch, formerly of IBM.

Jeff Raskin, meanwhile, was heading up development of the Macintosh, which had smaller businesses and home users firmly in its sights, and each team wanted to be the first to ship an Apple computer with a graphical interface.

Whichever team got their first, Apple – as a company – wanted them to do it at a price that wasn’t prohibitively expensive, and that meant finding some cheaper solutions to the ones arrived at by Xerox. The Alto’s mouse, for example, had three buttons and cost $300. Jobs wanted something simpler, and capped the price at $15. The result was a one-button mouse (which maybe hasn’t stood the test of time as well as Jobs might have expected, with most of us regularly requiring that ctrl-click or right-click).

Jobs was so excited by the potential of the mouse and graphical interface that he got himself more and more involved in the Lisa’s development, to the extent that he started to bypass the management structure already in place. The caused upsets, and in 1982 matters came to a head.

The Apple Lisa had an advanced gui

Michael Scott was Apple’s president and CEO at the time, having been brought to the post by Mark Markkula (Apple employee number three, and investor to the tune of $250,000). The two men worked out a new corporate structure, which sidelined Jobs with immediate effect, and handed control of the Lisa project back to John Couch. Jobs, also stripped of responsibility for research and development within the company, was little more than a figurehead. That left him on the lookout for a new project.

Perhaps inevitably, he turned to the Macintosh.

Named in honour of Raskin’s favourite edible apple (the McIntosh ), the Macintosh had been in the works since 1979, so when Jobs joined the team it was already well advanced. That didn’t stop him making extensive changes though, including the commission of a new external design and integration the graphical operating system. Raskin left the Macintosh team when he and Jobs fell out, and Jobs assumed control for the remainder of its development.

However, this enforced switching of sides meant that Jobs – technically – ended up on the losing team. The Lisa launched in 1983, with its graphical user interface in place; the Macintosh debuted the following year. The race had been won by the Lisa.

It was a pyrrhic victory, though. The Macintosh, which we’ll be covering in more detail below, was a success, and Apple’s current computer line-up – iOS devices aside – descends directly from that first consumer machine.

You can’t say the same of the Lisa. It cost four times the price of the Macintosh, and although it had a higher resolution display and could address more memory, it wasn’t nearly as successful. Apple released seven applications for it, covering all of the usual business bases, but third party support was poor.

Nonetheless, Apple didn’t give up. The original Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, which cost around half the price of its predecessor and used the same 3.5in disks as the Macintosh. Then, in 1985, it rebranded the hard drive-equipped Lisa 2 as the Macintosh XL and stimulated sales with a price cut.

At this point, though, the numbers didn’t add up, and the Lisa had to go. The Macintosh went on to define the company.

By 1984, Apple had proved twice over that it was a force to be reckoned with. It had taken on IBM, the biggest name in business computing, and acquitted itself admirably. The Apple I and II were resounding successes, but while the Apple III and Lisa had been remarkable machines, they hadn’t captured the public imagination to the same degree as their predecessors. Apple needed another hit, both to guarantee its future and to target the lower end of the market, which to date it had largely ignored.

That hit, we all now know, was the Macintosh: the machine that largely guaranteed the company’s future.

If you’d like a visual guide to Apple history take a look at our Apple timeline in pictures and video

All change: Jef Raskin versus Steve Jobs

The Macintosh

We’ll always remember Steve Jobs as the man who launched the Macintosh, but he only arrived on the project in 1981 – two years after Jef Raskin had started work on the low-cost computer for home and business use. Jobs quickly stamped his mark on it, and Raskin left in 1982 – before the product shipped. We must give Raskin credit for original idea and its name (his favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh, but this was tweaked to avoid infringing copyright), but otherwise the machine that eventually launched was a fair way away from the one he’d originally envisaged.

Raskin’s early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple (he is Vice President of Software Technology), that really pushed the team to implement the graphical user interface (GUI) for which it became famous.

They saw the potential of the GUI’s desktop metaphor after seeing one in use at Xerox PARC, and they’d already laid much of the groundwork for Apple’s own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which, in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple.

If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it’s unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did – and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all.

The Macintosh project: Simpler and smarter

Through several iterations, the prototype Macintosh became both more able and less complex to build. It had fewer chips, and the Apple engineers were able to push them further and faster. By the time it was ready to launch, the Macintosh incorporated the kind of graphics hardware that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy in any rival machine, yet Apple was aiming to sell it at a price that would put it in reach of the better-heeled home user.

The final spec was radical for its day, with a 6MHz Motorola 68000 processor ramped up to 7.8MHz, 128KB of Ram, and a 9in black and white screen with a fixed 512 x 342 pixels. To put that into perspective, it’s not even enough to display an app icon from a retina-class iOS device at its native resolution, but it could still accommodate System Software 1.0 – Apple’s fully graphical operating system.

The Macintosh project: good looks

But it wasn’t just what went on inside the box that made it such an attractive device. The Macintosh looked just good on the outside. Sure, it was shrouded in beige plastic – but the all in one body incorporated the floppy drive and a handy carrying handle, so you could easily take it with you, wherever you needed to work. It looked friendly, too, and that made it more approachable.

There were still some limitations, though. The original Macintosh didn’t have a hard drive, so you had to boot from a floppy and could only temporarily eject the system disk when you needed to access applications and data. Apple partially fixed this shortcoming by offering an external add-on drive, which allowed users to keep the System disk in situ and delegate responsibility for apps and data to a second disk. It was an expensive add-on, though, and the external Hard Disk 20, which cost $1495 and gave just 20MB of storage, was still a year away from going on sale.

Despite it limitations, though, many of the features established on that first Macintosh are still in use today. We’ve dropped the ‘System’ monicker in favour of ‘OS’ (which stands for Operating System), but we still use the Finder name, which debuted there, and both Command and Option appeared as modifier buttons on its keyboard (the latter has since been usurped by alt, at least in the UK, but the name lives on for many users).

(You’d be surprised by how many people are confused by the fact that Apple still referrs to the Option key on the Mac keyboard even though on UK keyboards that key is known as Alt, find out more here : What is Option on a Mac?)

The Macintosh project: pixels

The hardware was only half of the story. Coder Bill Atkinson had implemented a radical system by which the Macintosh System software allowed for overlapping windows in a more efficient manner than the computers at PARC had done, and Susan Kare spent months developing a visual language in the form of on-screen icons that have since become classics.

Susan Kare and the Command logo she designed

It’s Kare that we have to thank for the on-screen wrist watch (to indicate a background process hogging resources) and the smiling Mac – among others – as well as the seemingly illogical square and circles combination she chose for the command key. (This is a common symbol in Sweden, where it’s used to denote a National Heritage site – not a campsite as has been reported.) Her paint bucket and lasso graphics are used widely in other applications, and the fonts she designed for use on the original Macintosh, which included Chiacgo, Geneva and Monaco, are still in use today – albeit in finer forms.

The Macintosh went on sale in January 1984, priced at $2,495. It wasn’t cheap, but it was good value for what you got, and that was reflected in its sales. By the beginning of May that same year, Apple had hit the landmark figure of 70,000 shipped units, which was likely helped in no small part by a remarkable piece of advertising directed by Ridley Scott.

Apple’s ‘1984’ advert

Nobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive (for its day) and friendly. It brought the GUI – graphical user interface – to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform.

Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us.

You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble – a big one – that any other company would likely have shied away from.

But then no other company employed Steve Jobs.

Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.

He put in a call to ChiatDay, Apple’s retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.

Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios in the UK, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.

The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.

International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.

So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John’s Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.

Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and ChiatDay turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’

It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it’s considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age ‘s list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made.

Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking ChiatDay to sell off the two ad slots they’d already booked it into.

One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. ChiatDay offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.

As Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, “Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. ‘I think we ought to go for it,’ he told his team.”

Thank goodness they did.

There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.

Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn’t have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.

The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs’ now legendary keynote, secured the company’s future, and kicked off a line of computers that’s still with us today – albeit in a very different configuration.

It’s perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony.

‘Lemmings’ once again depicted a stream of drones plodding across the screen. The colours were muted, the soundtrack was downbeat, and the drones were blindfolded, so it was only by keeping a hand on the drone ahead of them that they could tell where they were headed. Only when the penultimate drone dropped off the cliff over which they were marching did the last in line realise that a change of course was called for – and a switch to Macintosh Office.

It wasn’t a great success. As sterndesign’s Apple Matters explains, the advert “left viewers with the feeling that they were inferior for not using the Mac. Turns out that insulting the very people you are trying to sell merchandise to is not the best idea.”

Wired put it succinctly: “Apple fell flat on its face… People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence – something very different from the cheers that greeted ‘1984’ a year earlier.”

The Macintosh and the DTP revolution

The Macintosh got off to a good start, thanks to Jobs’ spectacular unveiling, its innovative design, and the iconic ‘1984’ advert, but it still needed a killer application, like VisiCalc had been on the Apple ][, if it was really going to thrive. It found it in the shape of PageMaker, backed up by the revolutionary Apple LaserWriter printer.

The $6,995 LaserWriter, introduced in March 1985 – just over a year after the Macintosh – was the first mass-market laser printer. It had a fixed 1.5MB internal memory for spooling pages and a Motorola 68000 processor under the hood – the same as the brain of both the Lisa and the Macintosh – running at 12MHz to put out eight 300dpi pages a minute.

It wasn’t the first laser printer – just as the Macintosh wasn’t the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn’t the first digital music player – but, in true Apple style, it was different , and that’s what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe’s PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.

It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.

As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985’s less popular Lemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, “Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer.”

So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing – so far – was the software.

Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term ‘Desktop Publishing’, heard of Apple’s intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac’s graphical interface and the printer’s high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.

The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn’t see again until we all started reading online.

Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work – which is perhaps why it’s favoured by so many designers today. It’s hard to believe, in an age where we’re used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh’s 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.

By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker’s annual sales had reached $18.4m – an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe .

PageMaker versus QuarkXPress

But good things don’t last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself).

Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.

Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later – in summer 1998 – Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes’ words, ‘announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose… a public company with three times Quark’s revenues’.

Quark versus InDesign

Of course, the acquisition didn’t go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story to anyone in publishing. Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of InDesign and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired.

PageMaker’s last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. It’s no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe’s site here .

InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that’s a shame as there’s still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.

Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.

Jobs vs Sculley

It’s all been good news so far in our story of Apple’s founding and early development. We’re still in the mid-eighties. The company is still young, but going from strength to strength, and it’s offering up some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Few would have guessed that trouble was just around the corner.

To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.

Steve Jobs may have been Apple’s most public face, and the co-founder of the company, but he wasn’t its CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn’t yet turned 30, and many on the board considered him too inexperienced for the role, so they first hired Michael Scott, and later Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 on the back of stock options he’d acquired at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple’s initial investors, but he didn’t want to run the company long term.

When he announced his desire to head back to retirement, the company set out to find a replacement. It settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously lured to Apple from Pepsi by asking ‘Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?’

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quotes one of Sculley’s reminiscences: ‘I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better.’

That’s exactly what he did, and during the honeymoon period everything seemed to be going swimmingly. As Michael Moritz writes in Return to the Little Kingdom, ‘At Apple, Sculley was greeted like an archangel and, for a time, could do no wrong. He and Jobs were quoted as saying that they could finish each others’ sentences.’

Their management styles were wildly different, though, and it’s perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn’t like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh.

From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over the years of gestation – as the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled.

Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn’t enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh 128K hit the shelves at $2,495.

That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn’t helped by a downturn in the company’s fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn’t hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign him in.

That’s exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 – just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team.

Talking to the BBC in 2012 , Sculley explained what went on inside the company at the time: “When the Macintosh Office [Apple’s office-wide computing environment including networked Macintosh computers, file server, and a laser printer] was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn’t afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings – not just to cover the Mac’s problems. That’s what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support.”

But Jobs wasn’t ready to go without a fight.

Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrest back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team, which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip.

The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. Again, they sided with Sculley, and Jobs’ fate was sealed.

Jobs leaves Apple

Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple’s chairman. That might sound like a plum job – indeed, a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.

This wasn’t Jobs’ style. He felt the need to move on and do something else and, a few months later, that’s what he did. He resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a company that would design and build high end workstations for use in academia, taking several key Apple staff with him.

If this had happened in the 2000s, when Apple was riding high on the back of the iPod and iPhone and was prepping the world for the launch of the iPad, it could have had catastrophic consequences. In the 1980s, though, the outcome was somewhat different.

DeWitt Robbeloth, editor of II Computing magazine, wrote in the October 1985 issue , “Most industry savants agree the move was good for Apple, or even crucial. Why? There were serious differences between the two about what Apple products should be like, how they should be marketed, and how the company should be run.”

So, Sculley was in control and could run Apple as he saw fit. Now we’ll see exactly where that takes the company over the following months. Read next: 12 Apple execs you need to know

Jean-Louis Gassée takes over from Steve Jobs

The most recent stop of our tour through the history of Apple saw Jobs leave the company after falling out with the board. It wasn’t entirely unexpected – and the news wasn’t greeted with the same kind of dread as the announcement of his cancer many years later. Indeed, Wall Street responded positively to Jobs’ departure, and the price of Apple stock went up.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been Apple’s Director of European Operations since 1981, was appointed by CEO John Sculley to take over from Jobs and head up Macintosh development. Fewer positions could have been more prestigious in a company that owed its very existence to that single iconic product line – particularly at a time when the company’s focus and ethos was about to undergo a significant change.

Apple post-Jobs (the first time)

In the months leading up to his departure, Jobs had been focused on consumer-friendly price points, initially wanting to sell the Macintosh for $1,000 or less into as many homes and businesses as possible. In the event, that never came to fruition, as the final spec simply couldn’t be built, marketed and shipped at that price while still turning a profit.

However, with Jobs now busy elsewhere, the board was free to re-think what Apple was about and the kind of machines it would produce. It was already appealing to creative business users thanks to the prevalence of Macs in design and layout offices so, logically enough, it made the decision to target the high-end market with more powerful, and thus more expensive Macs. Although the company would sell fewer units, each one should – in theory – deliver similar or higher profits.

The policy had its own nickname, ’55 or die’, which was a nod to Gassée’s dictat that the Macintosh II should deliver at least 55% profit per machine, perhaps explains why it was so expensive. A basic system with a 20MB hard drive (insufficient to hold an average Photoshop file today) started at $5500, but bumping up the spec, with a colour display, more memory and larger hard drive, could easily see the price double.

When stood against their PC counterparts, then, Apple’s new computers looked pretty expensive, but they had several benefits that kept their users loyal – in particular, the user interface. It’s important to remember that although Windows may be ubiquitous today, that wasn’t always the case.

When the Macintosh II first appeared in 1987, Windows was less than two years old, still at version 1.04, and still an add-on to DOS rather than a full-blown, stand-alone operating system.

Once the designers of the mid-1980s had got used to working visually, they didn’t want to go back to using a text-based computer, so until Windows hit the big time, which happened with Windows 3 at the end of the 1980s, Apple had the graphical market pretty much to itself.

Apple gets colourful: the Machintosh II ships with a colour display

This would be enough to encourage complacency in some companies, but not Apple, which continued to innovate in a way that would at least partially justify the high prices. The Machintosh II, for instance, wasn’t simply a spec-boost of the original Macintosh. It looked completely different, being housed in a horizontal case that the end user (or an engineer) could open themselves to upgrade the memory, drives and so on. This was a major break from Apple’s established way of doing things, where all previous computers, with the exception of the build-it-yourself Apple I, had been shipped in closed boxes, largely because Jobs saw this as a way of making them more friendly and less threatening.

It was also the first Macintosh to ship with a colour display, and although it’s difficult to imagine what a difference that would make today, we only need to think back to early, mono iPods and compare them to the iPod touch to understand the impact it must have had.

Aside from heading up the development of conventional computers, Gassée also oversaw a lot of Apple’s behind-the-scenes development, where designers were dreaming up new products that would one day drive the company to new heights. Two of the fruits of those labours, the Newton MessagePad and the eMate, were particularly prescient, as they pointed towards Apple’s later dominance of lightweight computing through the iPad and iPhone, but they didn’t see the light of day before Gassée’s own departure from Apple.

His tenure ran from 1981 until the end of the decade, which was the point the focus on highly-priced premium products started to falter. IBM clones were getting cheaper, and with the uptake of Windows and inexpensive desktop publishing applications, even some of Apple’s most loyal customers were tempted to jump ship.

What Gassée did after Apple

The fourth quarter of 1989 marked the first time Apple had seen a drop in sales. The stock market got edgy, Apple’s shares lost a fifth of its value, and despite having once been tipped to one day head up the company, Gassée left the following year. Like Jobs, he went on to found another radical computer company – in this case, Be Incorporated, which developed the BeOS operating system.

As we’ll see in a later episode, his work with BeOS would come close to bringing Gassée back to the company. For now, though, Apple was focused on trying to win back some of the less wealthy customers by introducing a range of lower-priced computers, including the Macintosh Classic (8MHz processor, integrated mono display, $999), Macintosh LC (16MHz processor, pizza box case, colour capable; the initials stood for LC, but it cost $999 without a display), and Macintosh IIsi (20MHz processor, large desktop case, $2999 without a display).

Today, amongst other things, Gassée writes a blog, here . 

Unsurprisingly, after so many years of waiting, Apple customers lapped up these new, affordable machines, and the company enjoyed a revival. Indeed, by returning to basics, almost literally, Apple was back on the up, and about to wow the world with two of its most radical products ever, as we’ll discover below.

Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise

So Steve Jobs has gone, and so has Jean-Louis Gassée, his successor as head of product development. All in all, the future isn’t looking so bright for Apple at this point in its story. Despite initially being quite successful in chasing high profits with wide margins, its market is starting to shrink and, with it, so did its retained income. For the first time in the company’s history, its year-end results showed its cash balances to be rising more slowly than they had the year before.

That wasn’t its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 – a direct competitor to the all-graphical OS, System.

Windows had been a slow burner until this point. Versions 1 and 2 came and went without bothering Apple to much, but Windows 3 was a different story entirely. The interface was more accomplished, which for the first time supported 256 colours, and it was more stable thanks to a new protected mode. The graphical design language had been implemented from end to end, with icons in place of program names in Windows Explorer, its equivalent of the Mac’s Finder.

It could also run MS DOS applications in a Windows window, so it felt more like the unified graphical OS experience we know today – and which was already a hallmark of Apple’s GUI underpinnings. In short, more people than ever before could happily spend their whole day in a Windows environment, which would have left them asking why they would buy a Mac when there were so many PCs to choose from.

Apple’s Quadra and Performa

Apple needed to up its game, which it did by developing a whole new line of computers that we now might think of as classics of their time: chiefly the Quadra and Performa, but also the less well-known Centris (which, as its name suggested, sat at the ‘centre’ of the line-up).

The Performa line was, in effect, a case of Apple rebranding its existing stock, but bundling them with consumer-friendly software like ClarisWorks and Grolier Encyclopedia so they would appeal to the home user. The idea was to make them a viable stock item for department stores and other lifestyle outlets, as to date Apple’s computers had only been available through authorised dealers and mail order (there was no such thing as the Apple Store back then).

It was a sound theory, and one that would have exposed the Apple brand to a whole new audience, but it didn’t quite work as might have been expected. In part that was because the enormous range of slightly different models was confusing – so confusing that Apple went to the expense of producing a 30-minute infomercial showing a regular family choosing and buying a Performa. You can still find it online, in six linked parts .

It’s unlike the kind of short and snappy advertising we’re used to these days, devoid of catchphrases, and it spends a lot of time explaining not only why a Performa is the right choice, but also why Windows is difficult to use. It’s hypnotic – and it’s hard to argue with its message, too, if you can devote enough time to it.

Macintosh Performa 6300

You can see a full list of the various Performa machines, and the original Macintosh models from which each one was derived on Wikipedia , and its clear from the minor differentiations between them that some of the simplicity on which Apple was founded – and to which it has since returned – had by now been lost.

Having so many computers to market and ship also meant the company had to try and predict which machines would sell best and build enough of each one to satisfy demand. That didn’t always happen, and with Windows-based computers approaching ubiquity, Apple realised it was going to have to team up with one of its long time rivals, IBM, if it was going to take a lead.

The AIM Alliance: Apple teams up with IBM and Motorola

Together, Apple, IBM and Motorola founded the AIM Alliance in October 1991 (the name is their initials), to build a brand new hardware and software combo called PReP – the PowerPC Reference Platform. This ambitious project would go head to head against the existing Windows / Intel hegemony by running a next-generation operating system (from Apple) on top of brand new RISC-based processors (from IBM and Motorola).

Apple’s nascent operating system was codenamed Pink, and not without good reason. Much of the code was rolled into Copland, the aborted OS that we’ve encountered once before in our tour of the archives, and it came about following an extraordinary meeting in which all of the company’s future projects were written down on blue and pink card. Those that made it onto blue paper were comparatively easy and could be implemented in the short term.

Those written on pink would require more effort, and a longer timeframe. The next generation OS, was naturally noted on one of the latter.

AIM Alliance’s plans never came to fruition on the software side, and there were problems on the hardware front, too. When you bring together three notable players like Apple, IBM and Motorola, it’s to be expected that they’d each have their own ideas about the best way to do things so, perhaps it was inevitable that their differing views on the reference platform’s make-up didn’t always align.

If it had worked out, PReP might indeed have changed the face of computing. It didn’t, of course, but it did result in a change of direction for Apple. PReP’s legacy was the PowerPC processor, which went on to form the bedrock of its computer line-up for years to come.

The PowerPC years

If you bought a new Apple computer any time between 1994 and 2006, you’ll have taken home a PowerPC-based device, the genesis of which we explored above. The fruit of a productive collaboration between Apple, IBM (yes IBM) and Motorola – the AIM Alliance – it was, for a while, one of the most advanced platforms on the planet. Indeed, it proved versatile enough to sit at the heart of everything from the lowly iBook, right up to the mightiest enterprise-focused Xserve.

PowerPC 601 Processor Prototype

The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC-Performance Computing, and its core technology was based on IBM’s POWER instruction set, so even though it was an innovation of the early-1990s it wasn’t an entirely alien platform for developers coding for the Mac.

This helped make PowerPC a viable alternative to the x86-based processors being shipped by Intel and AMD, which were then dominating the computing market. Even Microsoft shipped a version of Windows NT for PowerPC before scaling back to focus solely on x86 and, later, Freescale.

The first PowerPC-based Macintosh (pre-Mac) was 1994’s Power Macintosh 6100 which, as its name suggests, was based on the 601 processor, running at 60MHz and developed using code that was already familiar to engineers from both Motorola and Apple. As the Quadra’s successor, it was the first machine able to run Mac OS 9, which would likely have been a big enough sales point on its own.

However, perhaps hedging its bets (platform transitions are nerve-wracking projects, after all) it also released a DOS-compatible version, which instead used an Intel 486 processor and allowed Windows and Mac OS to be run simultaneously, effectively doing what VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop do today, and VirtualPC did in the PowerPC line’s latter years.

Power Macintosh 6100

The 6100 was released in concert with the beefier Power Macintosh 7100, which had been developed under the internal codename ‘Carl Sagan’. It was a convoluted choice, based on the belief that the computer was so brilliant it would make the company ‘Billions and Billions’, which just happened to be the name of a book written by astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to stress the letter ‘B’ when saying the word ‘billions’ so people wouldn’t confuse it with millions.

Although it was never used to market the 7100, Sagan claimed that customers might have considered the codename, which was revealed in a magazine, to imply that he endorsed the product. He wrote to the magazine, asking them to make it clear that he did not, at which point Apple’s development team re-named the computer BHA, for Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued for libel and lost, with the court ruling that “one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase ‘butt-head'” .

Eventually the two parties settled out of court, at which point the 7100 was again renamed, this time to LAW, or Lawyers Are Wimps.

The PowerPC line enjoyed a good innings, but by the middle of this century’s first decade (we’re jumping ahead a bit here to tie-up the PowerPC story), fractures were starting to appear in the alliance and the platform wasn’t evolving quickly enough to keep consumers happy. Apple’s high-end notebook, the PowerBook, was starting to look a little underpowered, and in an effort to push the processor in the Power Mac G5 beyond its native rating, it produced three special editions that employed a sophisticated water cooling system that allowed it to overclock the processor without it overheating.

PowerPC 970FX processor, as used in one of the last Power Mac G5s

Those in the know began talking about parallel teams working inside Apple HQ on a version of OS X that would run on Intel processors. The gossip was never confirmed, but the fact it had even been mooted meant Jobs’ 2005 announcement that the company would shift its entire line-up to Intel hardware was less of a shock than it might have been.

Jumping ship just four years after the introduction of OS X would have been too big a move for many CEOs, who might have been afraid that they’d frighten away their customers. As Macworld wrote, ‘It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. “As we look ahead… we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come,” Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. “[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map.”‘

You might have expected developers to be up in arms: after decades of honing their code to run smoothly on PowerPC architecture, they’d have to throw it away and start from scratch, but Apple gave them a crutch, at least in the interim. Rather than cut off support for legacy code from day one, it built a runtime layer into OS X Tiger (10.4), called Rosetta, a name inspired by the Rosetta Stone, the multi-lingual engravings on which were the key to understanding hieroglyphics.

This interim layer intercepted Power G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions and converted them, on the fly, to Intel-compatible code. There would have been a slight performance hit, naturally, but it was an impressive stopgap, and one that Apple maintained until it shipped Lion. (Although Snow Leopard , the last iteration to support it and the first for which there was no PowerPC release, didn’t install it by default – you had to add it manually.)

PowerPC lives on, not only in the countless legacy Macs that are still putting in good service, but in consumer devices like the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as in faceless computing applications where it’s a popular choice for embedded processing.

Of course, during the 12 years of PowerPC’s dominance, many other things were going on behind the scenes. Apple was working on the Newton MessagePad, chipping away at a revolutionary operating system that never shipped and, as a result, bought Steve Jobs’ company NeXT and, with it, Jobs himself, ensuring Apple’s survival.

Apple and Microsoft

If IT was a soap opera, Apple and Microsoft’s on-off relationship would put EastEnders to shame. Today, you’d never guess there had ever been anything wrong, and that’s probably down to the fact that their relationship has never been more symbiotic.

IDC figures released in summer 2015 showed Mac sales to have climbed by 16% over the previous quarter. At the same time, though, the overall PC market for machines running Windows had dipped by 11.8%. So, with ever more of Microsoft’s revenue coming from Office 365, it needs to push its subscription-based productivity service onto as many platforms as it can – including Android, iOS and, of course, the Mac.

Apple, on the other hand, needs Office. It has its own productivity apps in the shape of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint remain more or less industry standards, so if it’s going to be taken seriously in the business world, Apple needs Microsoft Office onboard.

So, a peace has broken out – and a long-lasting one at that, which despite some sniping from either side, stretches right back to Jobs’ return to Apple after his time at NeXT. We’ll come to that later, but suffice it to say at this point that it shouldn’t really surprise us: the rivalry between the two camps often seems overblown.

Microsoft developed many of the Office apps for the Mac before porting them to the PC and, in the early days at least, Bill Gates had good things to say about the company. “To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different,” he said in 1984, “it takes something that’s really new, and really captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh – of all the machines I’ve seen – is the only one that meets that standard.”

That’s pretty flattering, but there’s a saying about flattery: imitation is its sincerest form. Apple apparently didn’t see it that way when Microsoft, in Apple’s eyes, went on to imitate its products a little too faithfully.

As we already know, Apple had been inspired by certain elements of an operating system it saw at Xerox PARC when it was developing the Macintosh and Lisa. Xerox’s implementation used the desktop metaphor now familiar to OS X, Windows and many Linux users, and when Microsoft was developing Windows 1.0, Apple licensed some of its fundamentals to the company that Jobs latterly took to calling “our friends up north”.

That was fine when Windows was just starting out, but when version 2 hit the shelves, with significant amendments, Apple was no longer so happy to share and share alike.

Microsoft Windows 1.0

Most significantly, Microsoft had implemented one of the features of which Apple was proudest: the ability to overlap live application windows. This is more complex as it sounds, as it requires some advanced calculations to determine which parts sit beneath others, not to mention how they should behave when repositioned.

However, Apple’s primary argument was that, taken as a whole, the generic look and feel of a graphical operating system – such as its resizable, movable windows, title bars and so on – should be subject to copyright protection, rather than each of the specific parts. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that this would be akin to Ford copyrighting the idea of a car, rather than a specific engine implementation or means of heating the windscreen, but back then, the GUI was such an innovation that you can understand why Apple would have wanted to protect it.

The court didn’t buy into the idea of look and feel, and asked Apple to come back with a more specific complaint, highlighting the parts of its own operating system that it believed Microsoft had stolen. So, Apple made a list of 189 points, of which all but 10 were thrown out by the court as having been covered by the licensing agreement drawn up between the two parties with respect to Windows 1.0. That left Apple with just 10 points on which to build its case.

Microsoft Windows 2.0

However, over at PARC, Xerox could see that if Apple won it might be able to claim the rights to those elements itself, even though they’d been dreamed up following on from Jobs et al’s tour of its labs. Xerox had no choice but to mount a claim itself, against Apple, stating that the operating environments on the Macintosh and Lisa infringed its own copyrights.

Ultimately, Xerox’s act of self-defence was unnecessary as the court ruled against Apple, deciding that while their specific implementation was important, the general idea of using office-like elements, such as folders and a desktop, was too generic to protect.

Apple appealed, but to no avail. However, it did at least avoid losing to Xerox, as the Palo Alto company’s claim was thrown out.

Of course, Apple and Microsoft patched things up eventually, and for that we should all be grateful. If they hadn’t, it’s possible there might be no Mac today. Why? Because when he came back to Apple and set about returning it to greatness, Jobs realised that he couldn’t do it alone. He might have a streamlined hardware line-up waiting in the wings, headlined by the groundbreaking iMac, but he knew that without the software to back them up they’d never attain their full potential.

Business users wouldn’t switch to a platform that didn’t support industry standard document formats, like those produced by Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and that remains true today. While home users and small teams will be happy to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, IT departments – particularly those in mixed-platform offices – often still rely on Microsoft Office formats.

So, Steve Jobs put in a personal call to Bill Gates , who was then Microsoft’s CEO, and convinced him to keep developing Office for Mac for at least the next five years. Gates did just that, and at the same time Microsoft bought $150m worth of non-voting Apple stock, thereby securing its future.

In return, Apple unseated Netscape as the Mac’s default browser and installed Internet Explorer in its place, which was actively developed right up until 2003, when in the face rumours that Apple was working on its own browser in house – Safari – Microsoft scaled back its work on IE for Mac to the point where, today, it no longer runs on OS X.

Apple in the 1990s

Apple was a very different company in the 1990s to the one we know today. It had a lot of products and a lot of stock, but not enough customers. There’s only so long a company can survive like that.

Looking back on it now, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was losing its way. Alongside its computer range, it was producing digital cameras (where it was ahead of most of the big-name players that now dominate photography), video consoles, TV appliances and CD players. It had also invested heavily in the Newton platform to produce the MessagePad and eMate lines.

In many respects, to use a well-worn cliche, it was running before it could walk. Almost all of these products have equivalents in Apple’s current line-up where they form the basis of the iPhone camera, Apple TV, iPad and so on, but in the 1990s there was no way to link them all together. They were, to all intents and purposes, disparate and largely disconnected products; there was no overarching storyline to what Apple was producing the way there is now, where the Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and iOS devices can all share data courtesy of iCloud.

To make matters worse, the decision to license a lot of its technologies was only making it harder for Apple to succeed in each marketplace, as it was enabling its rivals to produce cheaper cloned versions of its top-line products. Even the Newton platform wasn’t immune, with Motorola, Siemens and Sharp, among others, using the operating system and hardware spec to build their own products.

Cloning remains a contentious issue in Apple history. Aside from being bad news from Apple’s in-house hardware development, many consumers would say it was actually good for the end user, as it encouraged competition and, as a result, lowered prices. That brought more people to the platform than Apple would have managed to attract on its own, which in turn ensured continued support from application developers, including key names like Adobe and Microsoft, without whom the computer line-up may well have collapsed.

But something had to give – and a decision had to be made, which turned out to be one of the most momentous decisions in the company’s history.

Jobs returns to Apple

Apple was still on the look out for a new operating system, as its in-house efforts weren’t going as well as it had hoped. By 1996 it had shortlisted two possible suppliers: BeOS and NeXTSTEP, each of which had a historical connection to Apple itself.

BeOS was developed by Be Inc, a company founded by former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassée. He had been appointed as Apple’s director of European operations in 1981 and, four years later, was responsible for informing Apple’s board of Jobs’ intention to oust CEO John Sculley – the act that led to Jobs’ departure from the company.

NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, came from NeXT – the company that Jobs founded upon leaving Apple. Although NeXT’s hardware didn’t go on to sell in the quantities that Apple was shipping, it was highly thought of and is perhaps best known as the platform on which Tim Berners Lee developed the World Wide Web while working at Cern.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher for either man – or either company – but in the end Apple chose NeXTSTEP.

If it had been a simple licensing deal that wouldn’t have been so remarkable, but in truth it was far more than that. Apple purchased NeXT itself – not just its operating system – for $429m in cash, plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, effectively buying back Steve Jobs in the process.

The man who had co-founded the company was returning to it after 12 years away.

Making changes

Buying NeXT wasn’t enough to fix Apple’s ongoing woes on its own. Its share price was declining, and over the next six months it fell still further, to a 12-year low.

Jobs convinced the board of directors that the company’s CEO, Gil Amelio, had to go and, when it agreed, it installed Jobs in his place as interim CEO. At that point, Apple began a remarkable period of restructuring that leads directly to the successful organisation it is today.

Jobs recognised that if Apple was going to survive it needed to concentrate on a narrower selection of products. He slimmed down the range of computers to just four – two for consumers and two for businesses – and closed down a lot of supplementary divisions, including the one working on the Newton.

At the same time, he saw that the licensing deals it had signed weren’t doing it any favours, and he brought them to an end. The immediate effect wasn’t good, as it saw the market share of new computers running Apple’s operating system dropping from 10% to just 3% – but at least 100% of them were being built by Apple itself.

The strategy paid off in the long run, though, and Apple’s computers and operating system are holding their own in a world where rivals are seeing year on year stagnation or – worse – decline.

Not everyone was convinced, though. When asked what he would do to fix the broken Apple Computer Inc, Michael Dell, who founded the Windows-based rival that carries his name, told a Gartner Symposium, ‘What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.’

Dell was riding high at the time, but over the years the two companies’ relative positions have changed, and in 2006 Jobs mocked his rival in an email he sent to Apple staff.

“Team,” the email read. “It turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.”

And were things “different tomorrow”?

Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the long run they were very different indeed. Apple grew to become the most valuable company in the world when measured by market capitalisation, while Dell went back to private ownership, as Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners bought out the existing shareholders.

How Steve Jobs Changed the Course of Animation

Jobs initially had Pixar focus on creating powerful hardware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jobs saw Pixar as a side project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Steve Jobs' life and Apple career, from cofounder, to exile, to CEO

• When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company was in dire straits. 
• He became CEO again and turned Apple around via new products and a Microsoft investment.
• During Jobs' tenure, Apple launched the iMac, iBook, iPod, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, and more.

Much of Apple's success is due to the vision of Steve Jobs, the late cofounder. Without him, Apple as we know it today might not even exist.

In 1976, after he dropped out of college, Jobs cofounded Apple with his high-school friend, Steve Wozniak , while they were still in their 20s, according to "Steve Jobs," a biography by Walter Isaacson.

Jobs would leave Apple in 1985 to start a new company, NeXT.

After Jobs' 1985 departure, Apple was in rough shape, chewing through CEOs and delivering one bad quarter of financial results after another.

Jobs had his say in the matter, reportedly telling Apple employees at the time, "F--- Michael Dell."

But in January 1998, at yet another Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Jobs ended his keynote with the first of his soon-to-be ubiquitous "One More Thing" announcements: Thanks to Jobs' product direction and Microsoft's help, Apple was finally profitable again.

A few months later in March, Jobs hired Tim Cook to head up Apple's worldwide operations. Cook would stay with the company, eventually becoming chief operating officer.

Behind the scenes, Jobs was also busy making some big changes for Apple employees: Under Jobs, the Apple cafeteria got much better food, and employees were barred from bringing their pets to the campus. He wanted everybody focused on their Apple jobs .

Jobs was also the father of four children. He had his oldest, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with his high-school girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan. Later, he had Reed Jobs , Erin Jobs, and Eve Jobs with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. 

Jobs met his wife Laurene when she was an MBA student at Stanford in 1989, according to Isaacson's biography. Jobs was giving a guest lecture at the university when his future wife and her friend snuck into the lecture late and ended up sitting next to the Apple cofounder.

Jobs return to Apple

In 1996, knowing he had to do something dramatic, then- Apple CEO Gil Amelio negotiated a deal to buy NeXT, the computer startup operated by an exiled Jobs, in hopes that he would bring some much-needed direction to the company.

Instead, Jobs staged a 1997 boardroom coup that resulted in Amelio's resignation. Jobs had decided that if Apple were to be saved, he would be the one to do it, even if it meant getting help from the company's rivals at Microsoft.

In August of that year, Jobs took the stage at the company's Macworld Expo event to announce that Apple had taken a $150 million investment from its long-time rivals at Microsoft.

"We need all the help we can get," Jobs said, to boos from the audience.

Jobs wasn't kidding. At the time, Apple's financial situation was so dire that Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell , one of Microsoft's biggest partners, said that if he were in Jobs' shoes, he'd "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Apple's comeback

Jobs needed the help. At this point, he was CEO of both Apple and Pixar Studios , of which he had become chief investor in 1986 after funding it with $10 million. Jobs is actually credited as an executive producer on 1995's "Toy Story."

By August of 1998, almost exactly a year after Microsoft cash came in, Apple released the iMac, an all-in-one, high-performance computer co-designed by Jobs and new talent Jonathan Ive.

The iMac came in multiple colors, the first time the world would get a taste of Ive's computer design sensibilities. This first iMac was a much-needed hit, selling 800,000 units in its first five months.

Jobs had originally pitched the name "MacMan" for this new Mac. It was Ken Segall, an executive with Apple's ad agency at the time, who suggested "iMac." The "i" is for "internet," since it took only two steps to connect to the web, but Apple has also said it stands for "individuality" and "innovation."

The naming scheme would stick around. In 1999, Apple introduced the "iBook," a funky machine that tried to replicate the iMac's success as an entry-level laptop.

But Apple's next dramatic move would come in 2001 when Mac OS X was released. Where Apple had been treading water with Mac OS 8 and 9, OS X was a drastic redesign based largely on the Unix and BSD technology at the core of Jobs' NeXT Computers.

Expansion under Jobs

From here, things started moving fast for Apple. Later in 2001, the company would open its first Apple Stores , in Virginia and California.

In October, Apple would take its first steps beyond the Mac with the iPod, a digital music player that promised "1,000 songs in your pocket." The iPod actually got off to a slow start, largely because it started at a pricey $399 and worked only on Macs.

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In 2003, Apple opened up the iTunes Music Store, with its novel pricing model of $0.99 per song, to turn the iPod into the center of a digital media universe. Around the same time, both iTunes and the iPod hit Windows, jump-starting Apple's music play.

But in 2003, Jobs received some news that would cast a shadow over the good times at Apple: he had pancreatic cancer. He kept it a secret until sharing the news with employees in 2004.

In just six years, Apple had gone from a laughingstock in tech to a serious player. And from 2003 to 2006, it went from around $6 per share to about $80 per share. Apple was still lagging behind Microsoft in market share, but it was making serious money. Celebrities like U2 and John Mayer were tapped to help out at company events.

In 2004, Jobs convened Project Purple, under his supervision and with Ive in charge, to develop a touch-screen device. Originally, Jobs envisioned a tablet, but it eventually turned into a concept for a cell phone.

The iPod lineup slowly grew, too. By 2005, there was the iPod, the iPod Mini, the iPad Nano, and the iPod Shuffle, in descending size order. That same year also saw the introduction of the first iPod with video, alongside the ability to buy movies and videos on iTunes.

In 2005, Motorola introduced the Rokr, a phone it made in partnership with Apple. It was the first phone that could play music from the iTunes Music Store. But it was limited to being able to store only 100 songs because of a limit in its software.

In 2006, Jobs made a big move that probably saved the Mac. Former CEO John Sculley had banked Apple's future on the pricey PowerPC processor, while the major Windows PC manufacturers stuck with Intel. It meant Macs were both more expensive to buy and harder to develop software for. But in 2006, Apple introduced the first MacBook Pro alongside a new iMac, both of which came with Intel processors. It also meant that for the first time you could install Windows on a Mac.

But at this point, Jobs' health was starting to fade, and observers started to take notice. Note how thin Jobs looks here, shaking hands with Disney CEO Bob Iger at a 2006 Apple event.

Still, 2006 also marked a personal victory for Jobs. He got to send this email to every Apple employee: "Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve."

Jobs leads Apple into the iPhone era

After years of speculation, Jobs officially unveiled the iPhone at January 2007's Macworld Expo. It combined the music features of the iPod with a slick, responsive touchscreen that didn't need a stylus, unlike most mobile devices at the time. And the iPhone's Safari was the first full-featured web browser on a phone.

An excited media dubbed it the "Jesus Phone." Excited fans camped out in front of Apple Stores nationwide. The iPhone was a massive hit, taking only 74 days from its August 2007 launch to sell a million units.

In 2008, Apple released the first big iPhone update: the iPhone 3GS. It had faster network speeds. But the biggest change was that it came with this thing called an App Store to let you install software from non-Apple developers. At launch, the App Store had 500 applications.

Famed venture investor John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers took the stage to announce a $100 million iFund for app developers. It was the start of the app economy, and Apple was leaving Microsoft in the dust.

He gets his iPad

Still, Jobs' health continued to loom over Apple. In August 2008, Bloomberg accidentally published a 2,500-word obituary of Jobs. At a September 2008 keynote, Jobs poked fun at the idea.

In 2009, Tim Cook was tapped as interim CEO, while Jobs took the first of three extended medical leaves. Even on Jobs' return, Cook became a regular keynote speaker at Apple events . When Jobs returned, his prognosis was listed as "excellent."

In 2010, Jobs finally introduced the Apple iPad, the tablet he had wanted since the early 2000s. That same year, he unveiled FaceTime , Apple's platform for video calls, which was an immediate hit.

The iPhone and the iPad accidentally started an internet standards war. Jobs thought Adobe's Flash, then the de facto standard for interactive web content, was slow and insecure, so Apple's mobile devices didn't support it. A jilted Adobe, recognizing the threat this posed to its business, took out magazine ads begging Apple to reconsider, to no avail.

In early 2011, during the last of his medical leaves, Jobs would give his final two product-announcement presentations: one in March for the iPad 2, and one in June for the iCloud service.

Jobs made his last public appearance in June 2011, in which he proposed a new Apple campus to the Cupertino City Council. After years of construction, Apple Park — the famed "spaceship" campus — opened in 2017.

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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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.

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.”

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.

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.

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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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.

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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.

Product Details

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

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• Occupation: Entrepreneur and inventor
• Born: February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California
• Died: October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California
• Best known for: Co-founding Apple Computers
• Jobs got the name for Apple Computers after spending some time at an apple orchard.
• The movie Brave from Disney Pixar was dedicated to Steve Jobs.
• Ashton Kutcher played the lead role in the 2013 film Jobs .
• He had four children including three daughters and a son.
• In 2013, Apple sold more than 350,000 iPhones a day.
• Fortune magazine named him as the "greatest entrepreneur of our time."
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Wearing jeans and sandals under his black robe, Jobs delivered a keynote address that spanned his adoption at birth to his insights into mortality after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about a year ago. In plainspoken terms, his address struck a balance between the obstacles he has encountered during his notably public life and the lessons he has gleaned—for example, from his high-profile ousting in 1985 from the computer company he helped start.

Go to the web site to view the video.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement address

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me,” said Jobs, 50. “It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life.”

The 2005 Commencement proceeded with its familiar mix of the goofy and the formal: Graduates attached plush animals to their caps and carried body-length flotation devices onto the field for the Wacky Walk. This traditional kickoff to the ceremony was once again a flurry of wild wigs, rock-star shades, feather boas and a few Speedo swim trunks.

Also seen were a procession of walking iPods, several balloon floats, spray-painted umbrellas and one group that unfurled a volleyball net and spontaneously started to play. The first ones on the field carried boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, while behind them a dance troupe in tutus and ape masks pranced around the track.

But calm was restored once the graduates took their seats and the Rev. Scotty McLennan, dean for religious life, delivered the opening invocation. President John Hennessy then welcomed the estimated 23,000 people in the stadium and, after a presentation of faculty, staff and student awards by Provost John Etchemendy, returned to the podium to introduce the keynote speaker.

Hennessy said Jobs embodied the university’s spirit, its “willingness to be bold and strike out in new directions.” Hennessy also touched on Jobs’ reputation as an innovator, a visionary and an advocate for education who developed partnerships during Apple’s earliest days to get computers into schools and communities.

Jobs began by noting that he dropped out of college, and that Sunday’s ceremony was the closest he had ever gotten to a university graduation. He then launched into the first part of his address, which focused on having faith that the dots of one’s life will connect down the road, even if the journey so far has not followed a clear pattern.

Jobs said his biological mother was an unwed graduate student who wanted him to go to college, so she chose a lawyer and his wife to be the adoptive parents. But because they ultimately wanted a girl, he was adopted by a working-class couple—neither of whom had college degrees, Jobs said.

Jobs said they pledged to send him to college, and when the time came, he chose Reed College in Portland, Ore. Concerned that tuition was draining his parents’ life savings and dissatisfied by his required courses, Jobs said he dropped out and began taking courses that interested him, including a calligraphy course that, a decade later, inspired him to design different fonts for the first Macintosh.

“Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs said. “You can only connect them looking backward, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Jobs also talked about love and loss, and how he discovered what he wanted to do in life at an early age. He was 20 years old when he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer, which in 10 years grew into a $2 billion company with 4,000 employees. After his departure from Apple, Jobs went on to found NeXT Software Inc., which was subsequently bought by Apple in 1997, returning him to the company that got him started.

“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,” Jobs said. “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”

The last part of his speech was about death. When he was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago, Jobs said doctors initially gave him up to six months to live. His cancer turned out to be a rare, curable form, and he quickly underwent surgery. He has since recovered, but the experience nonetheless taught him another lesson.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs said. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

After a standing ovation, Hennessy brought the ceremony to a close with remarks that honored Jane Stanford?this year being the centennial of her death. The graduates of each school were then asked by their deans to stand for the conferral of degrees by Hennessy.

“Stanford is committed to keeping the spirit envisioned by Jane and Leland Stanford alive, and instilling it in the generations of students who pass this way,” Hennessy said. “And so, I hope that you leave this campus with a strong reservoir of the Stanford spirit, a reservoir that will grow over the years.”

On Sunday, 1,782 bachelor’s degrees were awarded, along with 2,026 master’s degrees and 904 doctoral degrees, according to Paddy McGowan, associate registrar and director of institutional research. Of the 1,732 undergraduates, 844 were female and 888 were male. Departmental honors were awarded to 388 undergraduates, 294 graduated with university distinction, 118 graduated with multiple majors, 477 completed minors, 70 graduated with dual bachelor’s degrees and 133 graduated with combined bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Among international students, there were 95 undergraduates from 40 different countries and 948 graduate students from 70 different nations, according to McGowan.

“I just can’t believe that I got here,” said Farah Giga of the Southern California suburb of LaVerne, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree with honors in computer science. “This makes five all-nighters in a row totally worth it.”

Kateri Jones sat among family members who came from all over California and Colorado for her daughter, Dyani Jones, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in human biology. One of the biggest achievements, her mother said, was just getting to this point.

“I just think it’s a remarkable accomplishment to get through this school,” she said. “Just the challenge of being here.”

Money Report

Steve Jobs' former intern reflects on working for the tech mogul: ‘I worked 20 yards away from him every day'

By sawdah bhaimiya,cnbc • published may 17, 2024 • updated on may 17, 2024 at 2:31 pm.

As a teen, Chet Kapoor dreamed of working for tech mogul Steve Jobs.

One day, that dream became a reality when Kapoor was hired as an intern at software company NeXT, founded by Jobs.

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"Steve was this iconic individual and I didn't know him … I was the guy that got coffee for the guy that made coffee," Kapoor — who is now CEO of generative AI company DataStax — told CNBC Make It.

"I was one step below the person that opened doors but that didn't matter because I worked 20 yards away from him [Jobs] every day."

Kapoor made his mark in Silicon Valley as CEO of cloud software company Apigee, which was acquired by Google in a $625 million deal in 2016. He has also held leadership positions at firms including Google and IBM.

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However, he credits a lot of his success to his experience working as Jobs' intern in the early days.

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Kapoor explained that he would focus on the questions that Jobs would ask in all-hand meetings more than anything else because it gave an insight into his thought process.

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"That exposure was absolutely phenomenal," he said. "I can attribute a large portion of my success to my first two or three years at NeXT."

'This is who I want to go and work for'

Kapoor, 57, was born in Kolkata, India, and recalled his mother taking him to the British Council library so he could read books while she went shopping.

"In 1983, I read this book called 'A Little Kingdom' and it was written by a guy by the name of Michael Moritz," Kapoor said. "This book was about two Steves: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It was all about Apple . I was impressionable because I was 15 or 16."

"I was like 'this is who I want to go and work for' and it was very clear to me that I wanted to come and hang out and work with Steve Jobs," he added.

Inspired by the book, Kapoor took computer classes and started applying to colleges in the United States. He eventually landed at Arizona State University in 1986.

During that time, Jobs left Apple and founded a new software company called NeXT in 1985. That's when the opportunity arose for Kapoor to fulfill his dream.

NeXT started a program called the Campus Consultants and started hiring students to work for them part-time from their colleges — and Kapoor became one of them in 1988.

The company asked Kapoor and a select few students to join the company as interns after they graduated, where they rotated through various odd jobs.

"I started working for NeXT five years after I imagined that I would be working for Steve," Kapoor said.

Jobs cultivated a 'strong engineering culture'

Jobs created a very "product and design-centric" environment at NeXT, according to Kapoor.

"Everything starts with what is the user experience. How is the user going to interact with this? That made all the difference in the world and the maniacal focus on that was absolutely amazing," Kapoor said.

This is reminiscent of Apple's culture, with Jobs saying in a 1985 Newsweek interview that he enjoyed "making things."

"What I'm best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them," Jobs said. "My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product."

iPhone users just see a new pretty interface, but there's a lot of "hardcore engineering" that happens behind the scenes, Kapoor explained.

"Everything starts with a very strong engineering culture," he said. "He drove a very hard, regimented schedule because otherwise, you just leave it, and it becomes a science project. He was very driven in that regard."

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Steve Jobs' 4 Kids: All About Reed, Lisa, Erin and Eve

The late Apple founder was a father of four

Jacqueline Weiss is a contributing writer at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE since 2022. Her work has previously appeared in Food & Wine, Insider and Apartment Therapy.

Steve Jobs left behind more than just his legacy at Apple.

The Apple Inc. co-founder, who died in 2011 after complications from a relapse of a rare form of pancreatic cancer, is survived by his four kids: Lisa, 46, Reed, 32, Erin, 28, and Eve, 25.

The tech CEO first became a father in 1978 when his daughter Lisa, whom he shares with Chrisann Brennan, was born. In 1991, Jobs married Laurene Powell , and the couple welcomed their first child together, son Reed, that same year. They then welcomed a daughter, Erin, a few years later in 1995, followed by a second daughter, Eve, in 1998.

After his passing, his widow Laurene inherited billions of dollars of stock in Apple and The Walt Disney Company , but she isn't planning to pass it on to any of her late husband's children.

"I'm not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that," she told The New York Times in February 2020. "Steve wasn't interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me."

"I inherited my wealth from my husband, who didn't care about the accumulation of wealth," she continued. "I am doing this in honor of his work, and I've dedicated my life to doing the very best I can to distribute it effectively, in ways that lift up individuals and communities in a sustainable way."

Read on for everything you need to know about Steve Jobs' four kids.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs, 46

Lisa Brennan-Jobs was born on May 17, 1978, when her mother, Chrisann Brennan, and Jobs were 23. They first met in 1972 and had an on-again-off-again relationship for several years.

Jobs did not assume responsibility for their baby, according to an excerpt from Brennan-Jobs' 2018 memoir Small Fry , where she wrote that her father arrived days after her birth, claiming, "It's not my kid." He denied that Brennan-Jobs was his daughter, stating in court papers that he was "sterile and infertile, and as a result, thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child."

She explained in the memoir that her mother worked several jobs and relied on welfare to make ends meet during the first two years of her life, writing, "My father didn't help." After a DNA test proved Jobs' paternity in 1980, the court required minimal child-support payments and medical insurance coverage for Lisa until age 18.

Lisa, now 46, attended Harvard University and also spent a year studying abroad at King's College in London. She moved to Manhattan after graduating from Harvard in 2000 to pursue writing, and has written for outlets including Vogue , The Massachusetts Review and O, The Oprah Magazine . She shares a son with her husband, Bill, a software designer.

While promoting his authorized biography in 2011, Jobs spoke about some of his regrets : "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."

Though the Apple founder expressed regret over his handling of the situation, other members of Jobs' family have disagreed with claims made by Lisa about her relationship with the late tech giant.

"Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times," Steve's widow Laurene, their three children and his sister, Mona Simpson, said in a statement to The New York Times .

"The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa and regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family," the statement concluded.

Reed Jobs, 32

After Jobs married Laurene Powell in March 1991, they welcomed their first child, Reed, on Sept. 22, 1991.

Reed, now 32, graduated from Stanford University with an honors degree in history and international security in 2014 and received a master's degree in history from Stanford the following year. Since September 2015, he has worked as the managing director of Emerson Collective, an organization founded by his mother in 2004.

While the collective as a whole focuses on everything from immigration reform to the environment, Reed's work is concentrated in the healthcare space. "While most other players in this space focus on philanthropy or investment, we're able to do both," he explains in a Q&A on Emerson Collective's website , noting that his team's "core goal" is to develop "new therapeutic options for cancer patients."

Erin Siena Jobs, 28

Born on Aug. 19, 1995, Erin is the most private of Jobs' children.

In Jobs' 2011 authorized biography, Steve Jobs , author Walter Isaacson wrote that Erin is "quiet, introspective" and has "a personal sensitivity more mature than her father's."

Erin told Isaacson for the biography: "He does his best to be both a father and the CEO of Apple, and he juggles those pretty well. Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know the work he's doing is very important and I think it's really cool, so I'm fine. I don't really need more attention."

While Erin doesn't appear to have any active social media profiles, her little sister Eve posted a tribute for her 26th birthday in 2021. "To my lifelong best friend — happy birthday!! I love you I love you I love you 🌟," Eve wrote next to a throwback photo of the sisters smiling on a boat.

Eve Jobs, 25

Eve Jobs was born on July 9, 1998, and is the youngest of Jobs' four children. She is a Stanford University graduate and an accomplished equestrian . In 2019, the show-jumper was ranked number five on the list of top 1,000 riders under 25 around the world, according to Horse Sport .

In December 2020, she made her debut as a model in Glossier's holiday ad campaign, joined by Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney and RuPaul's Drag Race runner-up Naomi Smalls .

After maintaining a low profile for most of her upbringing and young adult life, Eve debuted her relationship on Instagram in early 2021 with Harry Hudson , a longtime close friend of Kylie Jenner . They have since deleted the photos posted together, leading to speculation that they have since called it quits.

A few months after making her Paris Fashion Week debut in September 2021, Eve announced in March 2022 that she had signed with DNA Model Management, which also represents faces including Kaia Gerber and Emily Ratajkowski . She also attended the 2022 Met Gala , dressed in Louis Vuitton.

Though Eve's focus seems to be on growing her modeling career, she still has her eye on the company founded by her father. After Apple unveiled the new iPhone 14 models in early September 2022, the 24-year-old appeared to poke fun at the release with a meme she shared on her Instagram Story .

The humorous post, originally shared by Wall Street Memes , featured a photo of an older man holding up a new button-down shirt that is seemingly identical to the one he is already wearing.

"Me upgrading from iPhone 13 to iPhone 14 after Apple's announcement today," read the caption.

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Shocking Facts about Steve Jobs

S teve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc., was not just a tech visionary but also a complex individual with a series of surprising twists in his life. Delve into the lesser-known aspects of Jobs’ journey, unveiling the enigma behind one of the most influential figures in modern history.

1. Early Life Abandonment

Born to unwed parents, Steve Jobs faced abandonment at an early age when he was put up for adoption. However, fate led him to Paul and Clara Jobs, who provided the nurturing environment that helped shape his future endeavors.

2. College Dropout

Despite his intellect, Jobs dropped out of Reed College after just one semester. However, his curiosity led him to continue auditing classes, including calligraphy, a decision that later influenced the design aesthetics of Apple products.

3. The Ouster from Apple

In a dramatic turn of events, Jobs was ousted from Apple Inc. in 1985 after a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley. This setback marked a low point in his career, but it also fueled his determination to bounce back stronger.

4. The Pixar Revolution

In 1986, Jobs made a bold move by acquiring the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which later evolved into Pixar Animation Studios. This acquisition not only transformed the animation industry but also propelled Jobs into the realm of billionaires.

5. Battle with Pancreatic Cancer

Behind the scenes of his illustrious career, Jobs fought a private battle with pancreatic cancer for several years. Despite his illness, he continued to lead Apple until his resignation as CEO in 2011, just weeks before his untimely demise.

6. The Minimalist Lifestyle

Despite his immense wealth, Jobs led a remarkably modest lifestyle. He resided in a simple Palo Alto house without air conditioning and drove a Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG with no license plates, embodying his minimalist philosophy.

7. The Reality Distortion Field

One of Jobs’ most remarkable traits was his persuasive charisma, often described as a “reality distortion field.” With his captivating presence, he had the uncanny ability to inspire and convince others to achieve seemingly impossible feats.

Steve Jobs’ life was a tapestry woven with unexpected twists and turns, from his humble beginnings to his meteoric rise as a tech titan. These shocking facts offer a deeper understanding of the man behind the iconic black turtleneck, revealing a multifaceted personality that continues to intrigue and inspire.

The post Shocking Facts about Steve Jobs appeared first on Kevin Hearld .