Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian-born graduate student. His birth parents, then unmarried, placed him for adoption, and he was raised by Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class couple who later settled in Mountain View and then Los Altos, in the region that would become Silicon Valley ^[1].

Paul Jobs, a machinist and mechanic, taught his son to take apart and rebuild electronics on a workbench in the family garage, an experience Jobs later credited with giving him confidence that manufactured objects could be understood and improved ^[2]. The neighborhood itself mattered: the Jobs family lived among engineers from Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed, and other technology firms, and the young Jobs absorbed the valley's culture of tinkering and enterprise.

At Homestead High School in Cupertino he met Steve Wozniak, an electronics prodigy five years his senior. The two collaborated on early projects, including illicit devices known as blue boxes that manipulated telephone networks, a venture Jobs later described as formative because it proved two young people could build something that affected large systems ^[1]. After graduating in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out after one semester. He continued auditing classes that interested him, including a calligraphy course he later said influenced the typography of the Macintosh, before returning to California and taking a job at the video game company Atari ^[2].

In 1974 Jobs traveled to India in search of spiritual instruction, returning with a lasting interest in Zen Buddhism that shaped his aesthetic preferences for the rest of his life ^[1]. Back in California he reconnected with Wozniak through the Homebrew Computer Club, a gathering of hobbyists building machines around newly affordable microprocessors.

Wozniak designed a compact single-board computer, and Jobs saw a business in it. On April 1, 1976, the two, together with Ronald Wayne, founded Apple Computer in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos ^[3]. Their first product, the Apple I, sold as a bare circuit board to hobbyists. The follow-up mattered far more: the Apple II, introduced in 1977, arrived as a finished consumer product with a plastic case, color graphics, and expansion slots. It became one of the first commercially successful personal computers and carried the company through its early years ^[3].

Apple's initial public offering in December 1980 made Jobs, then 25, extraordinarily wealthy and turned the company into a symbol of the young industry. In 1979 he had visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and seen a graphical user interface controlled by a mouse. Convinced this was the future of computing, he drove its development at Apple, first in the unsuccessful Lisa and then in the Macintosh, launched in January 1984 with a famous Super Bowl television advertisement directed by Ridley Scott ^[1]. The Macintosh introduced millions of people to windows, icons, and menus, though early sales fell short of expectations. After a power struggle with chief executive John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi, the board stripped Jobs of operational authority, and he resigned from Apple in September 1985 ^[2].

Any account of Steve Jobs achievements must cover two companies he built during his exile from Apple. In 1985 he founded NeXT, a computer firm aimed at higher education and research. NeXT's hardware sold poorly, but its object-oriented operating system, NeXTSTEP, was technically advanced; Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and server on a NeXT machine at CERN in 1990 ^[4].

In 1986 Jobs purchased the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for ten million dollars and incorporated it as Pixar. After years of losses, the studio partnered with Disney and released Toy Story in 1995, the first entirely computer-animated feature film. Pixar's public offering the same week made Jobs a billionaire, and Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006 for roughly 7.4 billion dollars made him Disney's largest individual shareholder ^[5].

Apple, meanwhile, was failing. In December 1996 it acquired NeXT for over 400 million dollars, bringing Jobs back as an adviser; by 1997 he was interim chief executive of a company months from insolvency ^[3]. The turnaround that followed ranks among the most studied episodes in business history. Jobs cut the product line drastically, secured an investment from Microsoft, and launched the colorful iMac in 1998. The iPod and the iTunes Store reorganized the music industry after 2001. The iPhone, unveiled in January 2007, merged a phone, a music player, and an internet device into a single touchscreen product and set the template for the modern smartphone ^[1]. The App Store followed in 2008 and the iPad in 2010. NeXT's software became the foundation of Mac OS X, and by 2011 Apple was contending for the title of most valuable public company in the world ^[3]. Jobs was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame and held or shared hundreds of patents covering everything from computer enclosures to the glass staircases in Apple's retail stores ^[6].

In 1978 Jobs had a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with his high school girlfriend Chrisann Brennan. He denied paternity for several years, a fact he later acknowledged with regret, before building a relationship with Lisa during her adolescence ^[1]. Apple's Lisa computer shared her name, a connection Jobs eventually admitted was intentional.

He married Laurene Powell, a Stanford business school graduate, in a Buddhist ceremony at Yosemite National Park in March 1991. The couple had three children, Reed, Erin, and Eve, and lived in Palo Alto in a relatively modest house without gates or visible security ^[2]. In the 1980s Jobs also located his biological mother and discovered that his biological sister was the novelist Mona Simpson, with whom he formed a close bond.

Jobs was a lifelong pescetarian and often followed restrictive diets. He dressed in a personal uniform of black mock turtlenecks, Levi's jeans, and New Balance sneakers, an intentional simplification he attributed partly to the designer Issey Miyake ^[1]. Colleagues described a demanding, sometimes harsh manager whose insistence on perfection could be bruising, yet who inspired teams to produce work they had not believed possible. His compensation as Apple chief executive after 1997 was famously one dollar a year, with his wealth held mainly in Apple and Disney stock ^[5].

In October 2003 doctors found a tumor on Jobs's pancreas. It proved to be a rare neuroendocrine form of pancreatic cancer, generally slower growing than the more common type. Jobs initially resisted surgery for nine months, trying dietary and alternative approaches before undergoing an operation in July 2004 to remove the tumor ^[1].

The following June he delivered the commencement address at Stanford University, a speech reflecting on his adoption, his dismissal from Apple, and his diagnosis. The address, with its closing advice to stay hungry and stay foolish, borrowed from the Whole Earth Catalog, became one of the most widely viewed graduation speeches ever recorded ^[7].

His health declined visibly through 2008. In January 2009 he took a medical leave, and in April of that year he received a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee ^[2]. He returned to work, introduced the iPad in January 2010, and took a final medical leave in January 2011. That June he made his last public appearances, presenting the iCloud service and proposing Apple's new circular campus to the Cupertino city council. Jobs resigned as chief executive on August 24, 2011, telling the board he could no longer meet his duties, and recommended Tim Cook as his successor. He died at his home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56, from complications of the cancer ^[3]. He was buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in an unmarked grave.

Reaction to his death was global and immediate. Makeshift memorials of apples, flowers, and handwritten notes appeared outside Apple stores from New York to Tokyo, and tributes came from heads of state as well as industry rivals ^[3]. President Barack Obama called him among the greatest of American innovators.

The company he left behind became the first American corporation to reach a trillion dollar market valuation in 2018, still selling descendants of the products he introduced. The smartphone pattern the iPhone established, a slab of glass driven by touch and an application marketplace, was adopted across the industry and now mediates daily life for billions of people. Apple Park, the campus he proposed in his final months, opened in 2017 with its theater named for him ^[3].

Steve Jobs facts continue to circulate in classrooms and boardrooms because his career offers unusual arcs: the founder fired from his own company who returned to rescue it, the college dropout who reshaped six industries (personal computers, animated film, music, phones, tablets, and digital publishing, by his biographer's count) ^[1]. Walter Isaacson's authorized 2011 biography, written from more than forty interviews with Jobs, became an international bestseller and the basis of a 2015 feature film. Museums including the Smithsonian hold Apple artifacts from his era, and the Computer History Museum preserves oral histories of the machines he shipped ^[6]. Assessments of the man remain divided between admiration for what he built and criticism of how he treated people while building it, but few dispute that any Steve Jobs biography is also a history of how computing became personal.