Steve Jobs

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This article is about the person. For the biography, see Steve Jobs (book). For the 2013
biographical film, see Jobs (film).
Steve Jobs

Jobs holding an iPhone 4 at Worldwide Developers Conference 2010
Born Steven Paul Jobs
February 24, 1955
San Francisco, California, US
Died October 5, 2011 (aged 56)
Palo Alto, California, US
Cause of death
Respiratory arrest caused by
Metastatic Insulinoma
Residence Palo Alto, California, US
Alma mater Reed College (dropped out)
Occupation Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO,
Apple Inc.
Co-founder and CEO,
Pixar
Founder and CEO,
NeXT Inc.
Years active 19742011
Net worth US $8.3 billion (July 2010)
Board
member of
The Walt Disney Company
[1]

Apple Inc.
Religion Zen Buddhism
(previously Lutheran)
[2]

Spouse(s) Laurene Powell
(m. 19912011; his death)
Partner(s) Chrisann Brennan
Children
Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Reed Jobs
Erin Jobs
Eve Jobs
Relatives Mona Simpson (sister)
Signature

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/dbz/; February 24, 1955 October 5, 2011)
[3][4]
was an
American entrepreneur,
[5]
marketer,
[6]
and inventor,
[7]
who was the co-founder, chairman, and
CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a charismatic and design-
driven pioneer of the personal computer revolution
[8][9]
and for his influential career in the
computer and consumer electronics fields, transforming "one industry after another, from
computers and smartphones to music and movies."
[10]
Jobs also co-founded and served as
chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors
of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar. Jobs was among the first
to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface,
which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh. He also played a
role in introducing the LaserWriter, one of the first widely available laser printers, to the
market.
[11]

After a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT,
a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and
business markets. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which
was spun off as Pixar.
[12]
He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He
served as CEO and majority shareholder until Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006.
[13]
In 1996,
after Apple had failed to deliver its operating system, Copland, Gil Amelio turned to NeXT
Computer, and the NeXTSTEP platform became the foundation for the Mac OS X.
[14]
Jobs
returned to Apple as an advisor, and took control of the company as an interim CEO. Jobs
brought Apple from near bankruptcy to profitability by 1998.
[15][16][17]

As the new CEO of the company, Jobs oversaw the development of
the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and on the services side, the company's Apple
Retail Stores, iTunes Store and the App Store.
[18]
The success of these products and
services provided several years of stable financial returns, and propelled Apple to become
the world's most valuable publicly traded company in 2011.
[19]
The reinvigoration of the
company is regarded by many commentators as one of the greatest turnarounds in business
history.
[20][21][22]

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreas neuroendocrine tumor. Though it was initially
treated, he reported a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and
appeared progressively thinner as his health declined.
[23]
On medical leave for most of 2011,
Jobs resigned in August that year, and was elected Chairman of the Board. He died
of respiratory arrest related to the tumor on October 5, 2011.
Jobs received a number of honors and public recognition for his influence in the technology
and music industries. He has been referred to as "legendary", a "futurist" and a
"visionary",
[24][25][26][27]
and has been described as the "Father of the Digital Revolution,"
[28]
a
"master of innovation,"
[29][30]
"the master evangelist of the digital age"
[31]
and a "design
perfectionist."
[32][33]

Contents
[hide]
1 Early life
2 Career
o 2.1 Early work
o 2.2 Apple Computer
o 2.3 NeXT Computer
o 2.4 Pixar and Disney
o 2.5 Return to Apple
o 2.6 Resignation
3 Business life
o 3.1 Wealth
o 3.2 Stock options backdating issue
o 3.3 Management style
3.3.1 Reality distortion field
o 3.4 Innovations and designs
3.4.1 The Macintosh Computer
3.4.2 The NeXT Computer
3.4.3 iMac
3.4.4 iPod
3.4.5 iPhone
o 3.5 Philanthropy
4 Personal life
o 4.1 Health issues
5 Death
o 5.1 Media coverage
6 Honors and public recognition
7 Portrayals and coverage in books, film, and theater
o 7.1 Books
o 7.2 Documentary films
o 7.3 Short film
o 7.4 Feature films
o 7.5 Theater
o 7.6 Television
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
o 10.1 Articles
o 10.2 Interviews
Early life
Jobs's birth parents met at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where his Syrian-born
biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (Arabic: ),
[34][35][36][37][38]
was an
undergraduate and then graduate student, and where his biological mother, Swiss-American
Joanne Carole Schieble, studied for a degree in speech language pathology. Jandali, who
emigrated to the U.S. from Homs, Syria at the age of 19, was a graduate student studying
political science when he met and became involved with Ms. Schieble. When Ms. Schieble
became pregnant, her fundamentalist father vehemently refused to let her marry Jandali, and
Ms. Schieble ended up going to California to have the baby and give it up for adoption. About
six months later, Ms. Schieble's father died suddenly, so she married Jandali in December
1955. Jandali swiftly finished his Ph.D. and got a teaching position at the University of
Wisconsin, Green Bay. The couple moved there and then had another child, Mona Simpson,
who is Steve Jobs's full sister. Their marriage lasted till 1962, and then Ms. Schieble moved
with her daughter to Los Angeles, and later remarried.
[39][40]

Jobs was born in San Francisco, California on February 24, 1955.
[41][42]
He was adopted at
birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (19221993) and Clara Jobs (ne Hagopian) (19241986),
an Armenian American.
[43][44]
Paul and Clara had gotten married in March 1946, ten days after
they met. Clara had an ectopic pregnancy and couldn't bear children. In 1955, nine years
after their marriage, they decided to adopt a child.
[45]
According to Steve Jobs's
commencement address at Stanford, Schieble wanted Jobs to be adopted only by a college
graduate couple. Schieble learned that Clara Jobs had not graduated from college and Paul
Jobs had only attended high school, but signed final adoption papers after they promised her
that the child would definitely be encouraged and supported to attend college. Later, when
asked about his "adoptive parents", Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs
"were my parents."
[46]
He stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents
1,000%."
[40]
Walter Isaacson wrote in his authorized biography about Steve Jobs that Steve
had told him, "Paul and Clara are 100% my parents. And Joanna and Abdulfatahare only a
sperm and an egg bank. It's not rude, it is the truth."
[45]

The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Jobs was five
years old.
[41][42]
The parents later adopted a daughter, Patty.
[41]
Paul worked as a mechanic
and a carpenter, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his
hands.
[41]
Paul showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating
to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a
result, he became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering.
[47]

Clara was an accountant
[46]
who taught him to read before he went to school.
[41]
Clara Jobs
had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what
became known as Silicon Valley.
[48]

Jobs's youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary
school in Mountain View, he frequently played pranks on others.
[49]
Though school officials
recommended that he skip two grades on account of his test scores, his parents elected for
him to skip only one grade.
[40][49]

Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino,
California.
[42]
At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who
shared the same interests in electronics. Fernandez introduced Jobs to his neighbor, Steve
Wozniak, a computer and electronics whiz kid, who was also known as "Woz". In 1969
Wozniak started building a little computer board with Fernandez that they named
"The Cream Soda Computer", which they showed to Jobs; he seemed really
interested.
[50]
Wozniak has stated that they called it the Cream Soda Computer because he
and Fernandez drank cream soda all the time whilst they worked on it and that he and Jobs
had gone to the same high school, although they did not know each other there.
[51]

Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford. They were spending
much of their life savings on their son's higher education.
[50]
Jobs dropped out of college after
six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes, including a course
on calligraphy.
[52]
In the commencement address he gave at Stanford, Jobs said that, while
he continued to audit classes at Reed, he slept on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returned
Coke bottles for food money, and got weekly free meals at the local Hare
Krishnatemple.
[53]
In that same speech, Jobs said: "If I had never dropped in on that
single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts."
[53]

Career
Early work

Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, September 1976
In 1972, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong. After
finishing it, Wozniak gave the board to Jobs, who then took the game down to Atari,
Inc. in Los Gatos, California. Atari thought that Jobs had built it and gave him a job as
a technician.
[54][55]
Atari's co-founder Nolan Bushnell later described him as "difficult but
valuable," pointing out that "he was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let
people know that."
[56]

Jobs traveled to India in mid-1974
[57]
to visit Neem Karoli Baba
[58]
at his Kainchi ashram with a
Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search
ofspiritual enlightenment. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted
because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973.
[55]
Then they made a long trek up a
dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji. In India, they spent a lot of time on bus rides
from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh.
[55]

After staying for seven months, Jobs left India
[59]
and returned to the US ahead of Daniel
Kottke.
[55]
Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved and he wore traditional
Indian clothing.
[60][61]
During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling
his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his]
life".
[62][63]
He also became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, engaged in
lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest St
Zen monastery in the US.
[64]
He considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan,
and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen.
[65]
Jobs would later say that people around
him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.
[62]

Jobs then returned to Atari, and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video
game Breakout. According to Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated
in the machine. Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board design and made a
deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the
number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the number
of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line.
[further
explanation needed]
According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of
the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.
[66]
Wozniak did not learn about
the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said
he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.
[67]

Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to
manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Jobs decided that they
could make money selling it. The clandestine sales of the illegal "blue boxes" went well, and
perhaps planted the seed in Jobs's mind that electronics could be fun and profitable.
[68]
Jobs,
in a 1994 interview, recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to figure out how to
build the blue boxes.
[69]
Jobs said that if not for the blue boxes, there would have been no
Apple. He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them.
[70][71]

Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak in
1975.
[42]
He greatly admired Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder
of Polaroid Corporation, and would explicitly model his own career after that of Land's.
[72][73]

In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own business, which they named "Apple Computer
Company" in remembrance of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. At first they
started off selling circuit boards.
[74]

Apple Computer
See also: History of Apple

Home of Paul and Clara Jobs, on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California. Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer in
its garage with Steve Wozniak andRonald Wayne in 1976. Wayne stayed only a short time, leaving Jobs
and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company.
In 1976, Wozniak single-handedly invented the Apple I computer. After Wozniak showed it to
Jobs, who suggested that they sell it, they and Ronald Wayne formed Apple Computer in the
garage of Jobs's parents in order to sell it.
[75]
Wayne stayed only a short time, leaving Jobs
and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company.
[76]
They received funding from a
then-semi-retired Intel product marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula.
[77]
Scott
McNealy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, said that Jobs broke a "glass age
ceiling" in Silicon Valley because he'd created a very successful company at a young age.
[71]

In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what
turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-
Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling
sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"
[78]

In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox
PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa. A
year later, Apple completed the Macintosh.
[79][80]

The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial titled "1984." At Apple's
annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced
the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as
"pandemonium."
[81]


Apple logointroduced May 17, 1976, created by Rob Janoffwith the rainbow scheme used until August 26,
1999.
While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees from
that time described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. Disappointing sales
caused a deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley, which devolved into a
power struggle between the two.
[82]
Jobs kept meetings running past midnight, sent out
lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7:00 am.
[83]

During an April 10 & 11 board meeting, Apple's board of directors gave Sculley the authority
to remove Jobs from all roles, except chairman, to reassign him to an undetermined position.
John delayed a reassignment. But when Sculley learned that Jobswho believed Sculley to
be "bad for Apple" and the wrong person to lead the companyhad been attempting to
organize a boardroom coup, on May 24, 1985, called a board meeting to resolve the matter.
Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley once again and removed Jobs from his
managerial duties as head of the Macintosh division. With no duties and exiled from the rest
of the company to an otherwise-empty building, Jobs stopped coming to work and later
resigned as chairman.
[82][84][85]
After unsuccessfully applying to fly on the Space Shuttle as
a civilian astronaut, and briefly considering starting a computer company in the Soviet
Union,
[86]
he resigned from Apple five months later.
[82]

In a speech Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, he said being fired from Apple was the
best thing that could have happened to him; "The heaviness of being successful was
replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me
to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." And he added, "I'm pretty sure none of
this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but
I guess the patient needed it."
[53][87][88]

NeXT Computer
See also: NeXT

A NeXTstation with the original keyboard, mouse and the NeXT MegaPixel monitor
Jobs founded NeXT Inc. in 1985 after his resignation
[83][89]
with $7 million. A year later he was
running out of money, and with no product on the horizon, he sought venture capital.
Eventually, Jobs attracted the attention of billionaire Ross Perot who invested heavily in the
company.
[90]
The NeXT computer was shown to the world at what was considered Jobs'
come back event,
[91]
a lavish (invitation only) gala launch event
[92]
and was described as a
multimedia extravaganza.
[93]
It was held at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, San
Francisco, California on Wednesday October 12, 1988.
NeXT workstations were first released in 1990, priced at $9,999. Like the Apple Lisa, the
NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was largely dismissed as cost-
prohibitive by the educational sector for which it was designed.
[94]
The NeXT workstation was
known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development
system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the financial, scientific, and academic community,
highlighting its innovative, experimental new technologies, such as the Mach kernel,
the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. Tim Berners-Lee invented
the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer at CERN.
[95]

The revised, second generation NeXTcube was released in 1990, also. Jobs touted it as the
first "interpersonal" computer that would replace the personal computer. With its
innovative NeXTMail multimedia email system, NeXTcube could share voice, image,
graphics, and video in email for the first time. "Interpersonal computing is going to
revolutionize human communications and groupwork", Jobs told reporters.
[96]
Jobs ran NeXT
with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the development of and attention
to NeXTcube's magnesium case.
[97]
This put considerable strain on NeXT's hardware division,
and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software
development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel.
[98]
The company reported its first profit of
$1.03 million in 1994.
[90]
In 1996, NeXT Software, Inc. released WebObjects, a framework for
Web application development. After NeXT was acquired by Apple Inc. in 1997, WebObjects
was used to build and run the Apple Store,
[98]
MobileMe services, and the iTunes Store.
Pixar and Disney
In 1986, Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer
graphics division for the price of $10 million, $5 million of which was given to the company as
capital.
[99]

The first film produced by the partnership, Toy Story (1995), with Jobs credited as executive
producer,
[100]
brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released. Over the
next 15 years, under Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter, the company produced box-office
hits A Bug's Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding
Nemo (2003); The Incredibles (2004); Cars (2006); Ratatouille (2007);WALL-
E (2008); Up (2009); and Toy Story 3 (2010). Finding Nemo, The
Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3 each received the Academy Award for
Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001.
[101]

In 2003 and 2004, as Pixar's contract with Disney was running out, Jobs and Disney chief
executive Michael Eisner tried but failed to negotiate a new partnership,
[102]
and in early 2004,
Jobs announced that Pixar would seek a new partner to distribute its films after its contract
with Disney expired.
In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to mend
relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that Disney
had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. When the deal
closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder with
approximately seven percent of the company's stock.
[103]
Jobs's holdings in Disney far
exceeded those of Eisner, who holds 1.7 percent, and of Disney family member Roy E.
Disney, who until his 2009 death held about one percent of the company's stock and whose
criticisms of Eisner especially that he soured Disney's relationship with Pixar accelerated
Eisner's ousting. Upon completion of the merger, Jobs received 7% of Disney shares, and
joined the Board of Directors as the largest individual shareholder.
[103][104][105]
Upon Jobs's
death his shares in Disney were transferred to the Steven P. Jobs Trust led by Laurene
Jobs.
[106]

Return to Apple
See also: "20002005: Return to profitability" in Apple, Inc.

Logo for the Think Differentcampaign designed byTBWA\Chiat\Day and initiated by Jobs after his return to
Apple Computer in 1997.
In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for $427 million. The deal was finalized in
February 1997,
[107]
bringing Jobs back to the company he co-founded. Jobs became de
facto chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997. He was formally named
interim chief executive in September.
[108]
In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on
returning to profitability, Jobs terminated a number of projects, such as Newton, Cyberdog,
and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering
Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors
opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims
was enough to terrorize a whole company."
[109]
Jobs also changed the licensing program
for Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making
machines.
With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple
products, most notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs's guidance,
the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new
products; since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple.
At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the "interim" modifier from his title at
Apple and became permanent CEO.
[110]
Jobs quipped at the time that he would be using the
title "iCEO".
[111]


Jobs on stage at Macworld Conference & Expo, San Francisco, January 11, 2005
The company subsequently branched out, introducing and improving upon other digital
appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music
software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and
music distribution. On June 29, 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the
introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, which also included the features
of an iPod and, with its own mobile browser, revolutionized the mobile browsing scene. While
stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminded his employees that "real artists ship".
[112]

Jobs was both admired and criticized for his consummate skill at persuasion and
salesmanship, which has been dubbed the "reality distortion field" and was particularly
evident during his keynote speeches (colloquially known as "Stevenotes") at Macworld
Expos and at Apple Worldwide Developers Conferences.
[113]

In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of Apple's poor recycling programs for e-waste in the
US by lashing out at environmental and other advocates at Apple's Annual Meeting in
Cupertino in April. A few weeks later, Apple announced it would take back iPods for free at
its retail stores. The Computer TakeBack Campaign responded by flying a banner from a
plane over the Stanford University graduation at which Jobs was the commencement
speaker.
[53]
The banner read "Steve, don't be a mini-playerrecycle all e-waste".
In 2006, he further expanded Apple's recycling programs to any US customer who buys a
new Mac. This program includes shipping and "environmentally friendly disposal" of their old
systems.
[114]

Resignation