1/37
Jobs, left, unveils the Apple IIc computer with Apple Chief Executive John Sculley and co-founder Steve Wozniak. Jobs and Wozniak met when Jobs was in high school in Cupertino, Calif., and Wozniak was intermittently attending college. The two partnered up to make and sell machines that let users make free international phone calls. In 1976, they founded Apple in a Los Altos, Calif., garage. (Sal Veder / Associated Press)
2/37
Jobs shows off his NeXTstation color computer at his company’s Redwood City, Calif., facility in 1991. The same year, he and his wife, Laurene Powell, were married at Yosemite National Park by a Buddhist monk. (Ben Margot / Associated Press)
3/37
Jobs announced in 1993 that Next would stop building computers and focus on its software. “The world doesn’t want really great hardware, it wants really cheap hardware,” he said. “I can’t really argue with that. (Kristy MacDonald / Associated Press)
4/37
The industry was shocked when Jobs announced that the struggling Apple had forged an alliance with its sworn enemy, Microsoft. At the 1997 Macworld Expo trade show, Microsoft Chief Executive Bill Gates chimes in via satellite. (Julia Malakie / Associated Press)
5/37
Jobs also announced that week that he had joined Apple’s board of directors. (John Mottern / AFP/Getty Images)
6/37
Jobs, as Apple’s interim chief executive, gives his keynote address to the Publishing 98 trade show in New York. He introduces an under-$2,000, 15-inch flat-screen monitor, among other products. (Richard Drew / Associated Press)
7/37
Steve Jobs introduces the iMac’s five new colors at the 1999 MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. (John G. Mabanglo / AFP/Getty Images)
8/37
Jobs introduces the Power Mac G4 computer during his keynote address at Seybold in San Francisco. He presented it as the fastest personal computer in history, saying it was up to 200% faster than the fastest Pentium III-based PCs. (John G. Mabanglo / AFP/Getty Images)
9/37
Jobs unveils a new titanium G4 Powerbook with a 15.2-inch screen at the 2000 MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. He also announced new configurations of the G4 desktop Macs as well as new audio and DVD software. (John G. Mabanglo / AFP/Getty Images)
10/37
Jobs demonstrates Apple’s new flat screen and G4 Cube at the Seybold Conference & Exposition. He also announced the upcoming launch of the OSX operating system. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
11/37
Apple will stop producing cathode ray tube displays, Jobs announces during the Apple Developers Conference in San Jose. He said Apple would be the first major computer company to produce all LCD displays. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
12/37
Apple Computer Inc. chief executive Steve Jobs holds the new IBM processor used by the new Apple G5 computer at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Monday, June 23, 2003. Jobs gave the keynote speech that introduced OS X operating system, code-name Panther. (Susan Ragan / Associated Press)
13/37
Steve Jobs delivers the keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, announcing the new Power Mac G5 desktop computer. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
14/37
Broadening the reach of the iTunes music store, Jobs announces a Microsoft Windows-compatible version of the popular Internet song-downloading service, which was previously available only on Macintosh operating systems. Compatibility with Windows “is a feature a lot of people thought we’d never have until … hell froze over,” Jobs said. (Ben Margot / Associated Press)
15/37
Jobs displays the new iPod Mini at the 2004 Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. (Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)
16/37
Jobs gestures as he delivers a keynote address at the 2004 MacWorld conference. Jobs announced several new products including the new iLife 4 software and the iPod Mini. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
17/37
Bono, of the band U2, and Jobs hold up iPods at an unveiling of a new branded iPod in San Jose. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
18/37
Jobs introduces the iPod Photo, which has a color screen to display photos and slide shows accompanied by music. The 60-gigabyte model could hold 25,000 photos and sold for $599; a 40-gigabyte model sold for $499. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
19/37
Jobs unveils the first Apple mini-store, in Palo Alto, Calif. The press conference was his first public appearance since he underwent surgery for cancer that July. Jobs, then 49, had taken a month-long leave to recuperate and quietly returned to work full time in September. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
20/37
Jobs holds up the new iPod, showing an episode of hit television show “Desperate Housewives.” Apple Computer Inc.’s momentum in 2005 seemed unstoppable as it launched one hit product after another: the iPod Shuffle, the Mac Mini, the iPod Nano, a video-playing iPod and TV shows for sale on its iTunes store. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
21/37
Jobs introduces a speaker system for iPods. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
22/37
Jobs announces a new iPod Shuffle, right, and compares it to the the older Shuffle, left. He also announced a new iPod nano with a 24-hour battery life and new games for the portable media player. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
23/37
Jobs demonstrates the new iPhone, a gadget with the capabilities of both an iPod and a cellphone, at the 2007 MacWorld conference. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
24/37
Consumers were excited about the much-hyped launch of the iPhone, focusing on its cool looks and innovative interface. The iPhone broke several cellphone-industry conventions about the relationships between handset manufacturers, carriers and consumers. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
25/37
Jobs gives the keynote address on the opening day of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 in San Francisco. (Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images)
26/37
Jobs talks about Safari for Windows at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
27/37
Jobs and his wife, Laurene Powell, meet with customers after the launch of the iPhone. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
28/37
Jobs shows off the new Macbook Air, a small, light laptop, during his keynote speech at the 2008 MacWorld conference in San Francisco. Almost exactly one year later, Jobs announced that he would take a medical leave of absence from Apple through June, saying his health issues were “more complex than I originally thought.” (Tony Avelar / AFP/Getty Images)
29/37
Shares of Apple Inc. fell 4% on Jan. 15, 2009, as investors struggled to parse Jobs’ announcement about his health. In an e-mail to employees, Jobs had said he would take the leave of absence “in order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products.” (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
30/37
Jobs announces the new iPhone 3G during the keynote speech at the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. He also announced innovations to the Mac OS X Leopard operating system. (Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
31/37
Jobs delivers the keynote speech during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. (Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
32/37
Jobs introduces new versions of the MacBook, left, and MacBook Pro at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
33/37
Jobs holds up the iPad, a portable device for reading books, watching video and surfing the Web, at its unveiling in San Francisco. “We think we’ve got the goods. We think we have done it,” he said. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
34/37
Jobs introduces the iPhone 4 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. “I grew up with ‘The Jetsons’ and ‘Star Trek,’ just dreaming about video calls,” Jobs told the audience. “And it’s real now.” (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
35/37
“This is the biggest leap we’ve taken since the original iPhone,” Jobs said of the iPhone 4 as he introduced it at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
36/37
Jobs announces the $99 Apple TV device, with 99-cent online TV show rentals. The majority of Hollywood studios, and two broadcast networks — CBS and NBC — declined to allow their shows to be included. “Not all of them wanted to take this step with us,” Jobs said. “We think the other studios will see the light.” (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
37/37
In his trademark black mock turtleneck, Jobs touts the new iPad 2. Apple had sold more than 15 million of the original version since its introduction in January 2010, and analysts expected the device to account for more than 80% of tablet sales in 2011. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
He was an abandoned child who grew up with the unshakable belief that he was destined to be a prince. How arrogant and sensible of him.
His personal hygiene was bad. He often wore no shoes and liked to stick his feet in the toilet. His food faddery was so extreme that he sometimes endangered his own health. While in a hospital for a liver transplant in 2009, he refused to wear a medical mask because he couldn’t stand the design. His own signature style, which featured jeans and a black turtleneck (Issey Miyake made him a lifetime supply of the latter, which he kept in a closet), was both anonymous and instantly recognizable. He was a control freak and a credit hog who burst into tears when he didn’t get what he wanted. He sometimes demeaned his girlfriends and his employees yet such was his charisma that they went on loving him. He lived in a Palo Alto house whose modest scale astounded his rival Bill Gates. He said that he came of age at a magical time, in the early 1970s, when his consciousness was raised by Zen, Bob Dylan, and the drug LSD.
FOR THE RECORD:
Steve Jobs: In the Oct. 29 Calendar section, a review of “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple co-founder, said that Jobs grew up in suburban Pal Alto (a misspelling of Palo Alto). In fact, he grew up in the communities of Mountain View and Los Altos. —
Full coverage: The life of Steve Jobs
J.P. Morgan or John Rockefeller, in other words, Steve Jobs wasn’t. Yet he died with a personal fortune of more than $8 billion (according to Forbes), having been a single-minded pioneer of the PC age, having created and built arguably the world’s most famous company, Apple, and having, in some way or another, touched all our lives. He was a visionary as ruthless and driven as any of the great first-generation American capitalists and his story already strikes us as a modern-day fable with a multitude of strange and enchanted details.
Journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson has previously written about Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Small wonder that Jobs picked him out, and Isaacson gives the Steve Jobs fairy tale a swift, full, and less than utterly flattering airing in a book that Jobs authorized himself and from whose stark white and black Apple-like cover he stares like a Zen digital master.
Jobs personally picked that mesmerizing image, while not having the time, or the health at that point, and maybe not the inclination either, to influence the text as a whole. Again, this is apt. Jobs drove his collaborators insane with his perfectionism yet he enabled them too. He knew the strengths and talents of others and was, for a tantrum-throwing Svengali, surprisingly self-aware. I’d guess that when he died less than a month ago he knew that Isaacson had served him fine.
“The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching a startup in his parents’ garage and building it into the world’s most valuable company. He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future,” Isaacson writes. “He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, could never accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.”
That’s the nub of the script that Isaacson follows. In assembling it he spent scores of hours with Jobs and interviewed hundreds of other people, including Jobs’ widow Laurene; a galaxy of his former girlfriends (among them Joan Baez and the writer Jennifer Egan); Jobs’ father by adoption; his blood sister, the novelist Mona Simpson; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Apple design guru Jonathan “Jony” Ive; Gates; Bono; Rupert Murdoch; George Lucas; Yo-Yo Ma; Michael Eisner; Jeffrey Katzenberg; etc., etc.
The list of acknowledged sources is a who’s who of shakers and movers, and Isaacson weaves these voices together to guide and flesh out a narrative whose lineaments are already feeling like part of our cultural DNA.
Jobs grows up in suburban Pal Alto with an adopted father he adores and who passes along a love for mechanics and electronics; he becomes a high school geek and freak with a fondness for “King Lear” and “Moby Dick,” then a college dropout; travels to India, works for Atari; with his partner Wozniak builds the first Apple computer and makes $100 million before he’s 25; plunges like Icarus, losing control of Apple in a July 4 power struggle in 1985; buys Pixar for a song from George Lucas and, with director John Lasseter, turns it into a wildly successful animation brand; gets Apple back and sees the advent of the Net as the conduit along which to build a vertically integrated consumer electronics company, with computers at the hub and a succession of revolutionary new devices — the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad — as the spokes.
Jobs actually envisions all this, and brings it to pass. His mantras, his secret? Fewer products, better products. As explained to Isaacson: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
Jobs believed that producing technology requires intuition and creativity, while making art requires rigorous scientific discipline. That was maybe his key insight, and his subsequent mission, Isaacson tells us, was to marry science and art, those two troubled bedfellows, and then market the heck out of them. Like many seemingly simple plans, this was excruciatingly tough to execute, and Isaacson is very good when he takes us behind the scenes and into the nuts and bolts of certain key events: the building of the “Think Different” ad campaign, for instance, or the wondrous launch of the first iMac, or the plotting of the first Apple store, or the moment when, late in the process, Jobs and Ive looked at each other and realized — oops! — the screen on the already developed iPhone was way too small and so scrapped it all and started over.
It’s great stuff, and the communicated thrill of work and invention brings “Steve Jobs” to life. Sometimes, as when Bono twitters on about the birth of the snazzy black U2 iPod, pages descend into drooling celeb-chat. Generally, though, Isaacson sidesteps that sinkhole, and if what the reader gets feels like oral history as much as considered biographical judgment, that’s actually all to the good. The books asking whether Jobs was really a Da Vinci, or an Einstein, or a Howard Hughes or Citizen Kane are doubtless already trundling down the pipe, but this one will always feel necessary. Its very unmediated quality turns it almost into original source.
Full coverage: The life of Steve Jobs
“Using an Apple product could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens in Kyoto that Jobs loved and neither experience was created by worshiping at the altar of openness or by letting a thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak,” Isaacson writes. That’s pretty fawning, but I guess we can all go along with it at this point. Unlike Morgan and Rockefeller and others of that generation, Jobs was no monopolist and he didn’t milk the government. He was less interested in making money than in making beautiful and useful objects that would light up and shape the modern world. Put like that, he does seem a hero.
Rayner’s most recent book is “A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age.”