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American businessman and inventor (1955–2011) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Steve Jobs | |
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.jpg) Jobs introducing the iPhone 4 in 2010 | |
| Born | Steven Paul Jobs[1] February 24, 1955 San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Died | October 5, 2011 (aged 56) Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Alta Mesa Memorial Park |
| Education | Reed College (attended) |
| Years active | 1971–2011 |
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| Spouse | |
| Partner | Chrisann Brennan (1972–1977) |
| Children | 4, including Lisa, Reed, and Eve |
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| Awards | Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumous, 2022) |
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Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted shortly afterwards. He attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India, seeking enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to further develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together, the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers.
Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh launched the desktop publishing industry in 1985 (for example, the Aldus Pagemaker) with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics and PostScript.
In 1985, Jobs departed Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO, John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took some Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets, serving as its CEO. In 1986, he helped develop the visual effects industry by funding the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm that eventually spun off independently as Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer-animated feature film Toy Story (1995) and became a leading animation studio, producing 28 films since.
In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with British designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products and services that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the "Think different" advertising campaign, and leading to the iMac, iTunes, Mac OS X, Apple Store, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, App Store, and iPad. Jobs was also a board member at Gap Inc. from 1999 to 2002.[3] In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He died of tumor-related respiratory arrest in 2011; in 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Since his death, he has won 141 patents; Jobs holds over 450 patents in total.[4]
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (Arabic: عبد الفتاح الجندلي). Abdulfattah Jandali was born in a Muslim household to wealthy Syrian parents, the youngest of nine siblings. After obtaining his undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut, Jandali pursued a PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin. There, he met Joanne Schieble, an American Catholic of Swiss-German descent whose parents owned a mink farm and real estate in Green Bay. The two fell in love but faced opposition from Schieble's father due to Jandali's Muslim faith. When Schieble became pregnant, she arranged for a closed adoption, and travelled to San Francisco to give birth.[5]
Schieble requested that her son be adopted by college graduates. A lawyer and his wife were selected, but they withdrew after discovering that the baby was a boy, so Jobs was instead adopted by Paul Reinhold and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs. Paul Jobs, an American of German descent, was the son of a dairy farmer from Washington County, Wisconsin. After dropping out of high school, he worked as a mechanic, then joined the US Coast Guard. When his ship was decommissioned at San Francisco, he bet he could find a wife within two weeks. He then met Clara Hagopian, an American of Armenian descent, and the two were engaged ten days later, in March 1946, and married that same year. The couple moved to Wisconsin, then Indiana, where Paul Jobs worked as a machinist and later as a car salesman. Since Clara missed San Francisco, she convinced Paul to move back. There, Paul worked as a repossession agent, and Clara became a bookkeeper. In 1955, after having an ectopic pregnancy, the couple looked to adopt a child.[5] Since they lacked a college education, Schieble initially refused to sign the adoption papers, and went to court to request that her son be removed from the Jobs household and placed with a different family, but changed her mind after Paul and Clara promised to pay for their son's college tuition.[5][6]
In his youth, Jobs's parents took him to a Lutheran church.[7] When Steve was in high school, Clara admitted to his girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, that she "was too frightened to love [Steve] for the first six months of his life ... I was scared they were going to take him away from me. Even after we won the case, Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. I wanted to return him." When Chrisann shared this comment with Steve, he stated that he was already aware,[8] and later said that he had been deeply loved and indulged by Paul and Clara. Jobs would "bristle" when Paul and Clara were referred to as his "adoptive parents", and he regarded them as his parents "1,000%". Jobs referred to his biological parents as "my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more."[9]
I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics... then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do.
—Steve Jobs[10]
Paul Jobs worked in several jobs that included a try as a machinist,[11] several other jobs,[12] and then "back to work as a machinist". Paul and Clara adopted Jobs's sister Patricia in 1957,[13] and by 1959 the family had moved to the Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, California.[14] Paul built a workbench in his garage for his son in order to "pass along his love of mechanics". Jobs, meanwhile, admired his father's craftsmanship "because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him ... I wasn't that into fixing cars ... but I was eager to hang out with my dad."[15]
Jobs had difficulty functioning in a traditional classroom, tended to resist authority figures, frequently misbehaved, and was suspended a few times. He frequently played pranks on others at Monta Loma Elementary School in Mountain View. His father Paul (who was abused as a child) never reprimanded him, however, and instead blamed the school for not challenging his brilliant son.[17] Jobs skipped the 5th grade and transferred to the 6th grade at Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View, where he became a "socially awkward loner".[18] Jobs was often "bullied" at Crittenden Middle, and in the middle of 7th grade, he gave his parents an ultimatum: either they would take him out of Crittenden or he would drop out of school.[19]
The Jobs family was not affluent, and only by expending all their savings were they able to buy a new home in 1967, allowing Steve to change schools. The new house (a three-bedroom home on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California) was in the better Cupertino School District, in Cupertino, California.[20] The house was declared a historic site in 2013, as the first site of Apple Computer.[16] As of 2013[update], it was owned by Jobs's sister, Patty, and occupied by his stepmother, Marilyn.[21] When he was 13, in 1968,[22] Jobs was given a summer job by Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard) after Jobs cold-called him to ask for parts for an electronics project.[23]
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The location of the Los Altos home meant that Jobs would be able to attend nearby Homestead High School, which had strong ties to Silicon Valley.[10] He began his first year there in late 1968 along with Bill Fernandez,[24] who introduced Jobs to Steve Wozniak, and would become Apple's first employee. Neither Jobs nor Fernandez (whose father was a lawyer) came from engineering households and thus decided to enroll in John McCollum's Electronics I class.[24] Jobs had grown his hair long and become involved in the growing counterculture, and the rebellious youth eventually clashed with McCollum and lost interest in the class.[24]
Jobs underwent a change during mid-1970. He later noted to his official biographer that "I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology — Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear ... when I was a senior I had this phenomenal AP English class. The teacher was this guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway. He took a bunch of us snowshoeing in Yosemite." During his last two years at Homestead High, Jobs developed two different interests: electronics and literature.[25] These dual interests were particularly reflected during Jobs's senior year, as his best friends were Wozniak and his first girlfriend, the artistic Homestead junior Chrisann Brennan.[26]
In 1971, after Wozniak began attending University of California, Berkeley, Jobs would visit him there a few times a week. This experience led him to study in nearby Stanford University's student union. Instead of joining the electronics club, Jobs put on light shows with a friend for Homestead's avant-garde jazz program. He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of brain and kind of hippie ... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider. In high school everything revolved around what group you were in, and if you weren't in a carefully defined group, you weren't anybody. He was an individual, in a world where individuality was suspect." By his senior year in late 1971, he was taking a freshman English class at Stanford and working on a Homestead underground film project with Chrisann Brennan.[27][28]
Around that time, Wozniak designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. He was inspired by an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire.[29] Jobs decided then to sell them and split the profit with Wozniak. The clandestine sales of the illegal blue boxes went well and perhaps planted the seed in Jobs's mind that electronics could be both fun and profitable.[30] In a 1994 interview, he recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to design the blue boxes.[31] Jobs later reflected that had it not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple".[32] He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them.[33][34]
By his senior year of high school, Jobs began using LSD.[25] He later recalled that on one occasion he consumed it in a wheat field outside Sunnyvale, and experienced "the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point".[35] In mid-1972, after graduation and before leaving for Reed College, Jobs and Brennan rented a house from their other roommate, Al.[36]
In September 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.[37] He insisted on applying only to Reed, although it was an expensive school that Paul and Clara could ill afford.[38] Jobs soon befriended Robert Friedland,[39] who was Reed's student body president at that time.[40] Brennan remained involved with Jobs while he was at Reed.
I was interested in Eastern mysticism which hit the shores about then. At Reed there was a constant flow of people stopping by – from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, to Gary Snyder. There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was the time when every college student in the country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet.
—Steve Jobs[41]
After just one semester, Jobs dropped out of Reed College without telling his parents.[42] Jobs later explained this was because he did not want to spend his parents' money on an education that seemed meaningless to him. He continued to attend by auditing his classes,[43] including a course on calligraphy that was taught by Robert Palladino. In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Jobs stated that during this period, he slept on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returned Coke bottles for food money, and got weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. 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".[44]
I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money [...] There are people around here who start companies just to make money, but the great companies, well, that's not what they're about.
—Steve Jobs[45]
In February 1974, Jobs returned to his parents' home in Los Altos and began looking for a job.[46] He was soon hired by Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California, as a computer technician.[46][47] Back in 1973, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong and gave its electronics board to Jobs. According to Wozniak, Atari only hired Jobs because he took the board down to the company, and they thought that he had built it himself.[48] Atari's cofounder 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".[49]
Jobs traveled to India in mid-1974[50] to visit Neem Karoli Baba[51] at his Kainchi ashram with his Reed College friend and eventual Apple employee Daniel Kottke, searching for spiritual teachings. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973. Then they made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji.[47]
After seven months, Jobs left India[52] and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke.[47] Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved, and he wore traditional Indian clothing.[53][54] 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".[55][56] He spent a period at the All One Farm, a commune in Oregon that was owned by Robert Friedland.
During this time period, Jobs and Brennan both became practitioners of Zen Buddhism through the Zen master Kōbun Chino Otogawa. Jobs engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the US.[57] He considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen,[58] Japanese cuisine, and artists such as Hasui Kawase.[59]
Jobs returned to Atari in early 1975, and that summer, Bushnell assigned him to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout in as few chips as possible, knowing that Jobs would recruit Wozniak for help. During his day job at HP, Wozniak drew sketches of the circuit design; at night, he joined Jobs at Atari and continued to refine the design, which Jobs implemented on a breadboard.[60] According to Bushnell, Atari offered $100 (equivalent to about $600 in 2023) for each TTL chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs 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, within four days Wozniak reduced the TTL count to 45, far below the usual 100, though Atari later re-engineered it to make it easier to test and add a few missing features.[61] According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari paid them only $750 (instead of the actual $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $375.[62] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later but said that if Jobs had told him about it and explained that he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.[63]
Jobs and Wozniak attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, which was a stepping stone to the development and marketing of the first Apple computer.[64] According to a document released by the United States Department of Defense, Jobs claimed that in 1975, he was arrested in Eugene, Oregon, after being questioned for being a minor in possession of alcohol. Jobs alleged that he "didn't have any alcohol", but police questioned him, and subsequently determined that he had an outstanding arrest warrant for an unpaid speeding ticket. Jobs claimed he then paid the $50 fine. The arrest allegedly occurred "behind a store".[65][66]
Basically Steve Wozniak and I invented the Apple because we wanted a personal computer. Not only couldn't we afford the computers that were on the market, those computers were impractical for us to use. We needed a Volkswagen. The Volkswagen isn't as fast or comfortable as other ways of traveling, but the VW owners can go where they want, when they want and with whom they want. The VW owners have personal control of their car.
—Steve Jobs[67]
By March 1976, Wozniak completed the basic design of the Apple I computer and showed it to Jobs, who suggested that they sell it; Wozniak was at first skeptical of the idea but later agreed.[68] In April of that same year, Jobs, Wozniak, and administrative overseer Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company (now called "Apple Inc.") as a business partnership in Jobs's parents' Crist Drive home on April 1, 1976. The operation originally started in Jobs's bedroom and later moved to the garage.[69][70] Wayne stayed briefly, leaving Jobs and Wozniak as the active primary cofounders of the company.[71]
The two decided on the name "Apple" after Jobs returned from the All One Farm commune in Oregon and told Wozniak about his time in the farm's apple orchard.[72] Jobs originally planned to produce bare printed circuit boards of the Apple I and sell them to computer hobbyists for $50 (equivalent to about $270 in 2023) each. To fund the first batch, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen van.[73][74] Later that year, computer retailer Paul Terrell purchased 50 fully assembled Apple I units for $500 each.[75][76] Eventually about 200 Apple I computers were produced in total.[77]
A neighbor on Crist Drive recalled Jobs as an odd individual who would greet his clients "with his underwear hanging out, barefoot and hippie-like". Another neighbor, Larry Waterland, who had just earned his PhD in chemical engineering at Stanford, recalled dismissing Jobs's budding business compared to the established industry of giant mainframe computers with big decks of punch cards: "Steve took me over to the garage. He had a circuit board with a chip on it, a DuMont TV set, a Panasonic cassette tape deck and a keyboard. He said, 'This is an Apple computer.' I said, 'You've got to be joking.' I dismissed the whole idea." Jobs's friend from Reed College and India, Daniel Kottke, recalled that as an early Apple employee, he "was the only person who worked in the garage ... Woz would show up once a week with his latest code. Steve Jobs didn't get his hands dirty in that sense." Kottke also stated that much of the early work took place in Jobs's kitchen, where he spent hours on the phone trying to find investors for the company.[21]
They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product marketing manager and engineer named Mike Markkula.[78] Scott McNealy, one of the cofounders 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.[34] Markkula brought Apple to the attention of Arthur Rock, which, after looking at the crowded Apple booth at the Home Brew Computer Show, started with a $60,000 investment and went on the Apple board.[79] Jobs was not pleased when Markkula recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor in February 1977 to serve as the first president and CEO of Apple.[80][81]
For what characterizes Apple is that its scientific staff always acted and performed like artists – in a field filled with dry personalities limited by the rational and binary worlds they inhabit, Apple's engineering teams had passion. They always believed that what they were doing was important and, most of all, fun. Working at Apple was never just a job; it was also a crusade, a mission, to bring better computer power to people. At its roots, that attitude came from Steve Jobs. It was "Power to the People", the slogan of the sixties, rewritten in technology for the eighties and called Macintosh.
—Jeffrey S. Young, 1987[82]
After Brennan returned from her own journey to India, she and Jobs fell in love again, as Brennan noted changes in him that she attributes to Kobun (whom she was also still following). It was also at this time that Jobs displayed a prototype Apple II computer for Brennan and his parents in their living room. Brennan notes a shift in this time period, where the two main influences on Jobs were Apple Inc. and Kobun.
In April 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire.[83] It is the first consumer product to have been sold by Apple Computer. Primarily designed by Wozniak, Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply.[84] During the design stage, Jobs argued that the Apple II should have two expansion slots, while Wozniak wanted eight. After a heated argument, Wozniak threatened that Jobs should "go get himself another computer". They later agreed on eight slots.[85] The Apple II became one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products in the world.[86]
As Jobs became more successful with his new company, his relationship with Brennan grew more complex. In 1977, the success of Apple was now a part of their relationship, and Brennan, Daniel Kottke, and Jobs moved into a house near the Apple office in Cupertino.[87] Brennan eventually took a position in the shipping department at Apple.[88] Brennan's relationship with Jobs deteriorated as his position with Apple grew, and she began to consider ending the relationship. In October 1977, Brennan was approached by Rod Holt, who asked her to take "a paid apprenticeship designing blueprints for the Apples".[89] Both Holt and Jobs believed that it would be a good position for her, given her artistic abilities. Holt was particularly eager that she take the position and puzzled by her ambivalence toward it. Brennan's decision, however, was overshadowed by the fact that she realized she was pregnant, and that Jobs was the father. It took her a few days to tell Jobs, whose face, according to Brennan, "turned ugly" at the news. At the same time, according to Brennan, at the beginning of her third trimester, Jobs said to her: "I never wanted to ask that you get an abortion. I just didn't want to do that."[90] He also refused to discuss the pregnancy with her.[90]
Brennan turned down the internship and decided to leave Apple. A few weeks before she was due to give birth, Brennan was invited to deliver her baby at the All One Farm. She accepted the offer.[89] When Jobs was 23 (the same age as his biological parents when they had him)[90] Brennan gave birth to her baby, Lisa Brennan, on May 17, 1978.[89] Jobs went there for the birth after he was contacted by Robert Friedland, their mutual friend and the farm owner. While distant, Jobs worked with her on a name for the baby, which they discussed while sitting in the fields on a blanket. Brennan suggested the name "Lisa" which Jobs also liked and notes that Jobs was very attached to the name "Lisa" while he "was also publicly denying paternity". She would discover later that during this time, Jobs was preparing to unveil a new kind of computer that he wanted to give a female name (his first choice was "Claire" after St. Clare). She stated that she never gave him permission to use the baby's name for a computer and he hid the plans from her. Jobs worked with his team to come up with the phrase, "Local Integrated Software Architecture" as an alternative explanation for the Apple Lisa.[91] Decades later, however, Jobs admitted to his biographer Walter Isaacson that "obviously, it was named for my daughter".[92]
When Jobs denied paternity, a DNA test established him as Lisa's father.[93] It required him to pay Brennan $385 (equivalent to about $1,200 in 2023) monthly in addition to returning the welfare money she had received. Jobs paid her $500 (equivalent to about $1,500 in 2023) monthly at the time when Apple went public and made him a millionaire. Later, Brennan agreed to interview with Michael Moritz for Time magazine for its Time Person of the Year special, released on January 3, 1983, in which she discussed her relationship with Jobs. Rather than name Jobs the Person of the Year, the magazine named the generic personal computer the "Machine of the Year".[94] In the issue, Jobs questioned the reliability of the paternity test, which stated that the "probability of paternity for Jobs, Steven... is 94.1%".[93] He responded by arguing that "28% of the male population of the United States could be the father". Time also noted that "the baby girl and the machine on which Apple has placed so much hope for the future share the same name: Lisa".[93]
In 1978, at age 23, Jobs was worth over $1 million (equivalent to $4.67 million in 2023). By age 25, his net worth grew to an estimated $250 million (equivalent to $838 million in 2023). He was also one of the youngest "people ever to make the Forbes list of the nation's richest people—and one of only a handful to have done it themselves, without inherited wealth".[95] In 1982, Jobs bought an apartment on the top two floors of The San Remo, a Manhattan building with a politically progressive reputation. Although he never lived there,[96] he spent years renovating it thanks to I. M. Pei. 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?".[97]
In 1984, Jobs bought the Jackling House and estate and resided there for a decade. Thereafter, he leased it out for several years until 2000 when he stopped maintaining the house, allowing weathering to degrade it. In 2004, Jobs received permission from the town of Woodside to demolish the house to build a smaller, contemporary styled one. After a few years in court, the house was finally demolished in 2011, a few months before he died.[98]
Jobs took over development of the Macintosh in 1981, from early Apple employee Jef Raskin, who had conceived the project. Wozniak and Raskin had heavily influenced the early program, and Wozniak was on leave during this time due to an airplane crash earlier that year, making it easier for Jobs to take over the project.[99][100][101] On January 22, 1984, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial titled "1984", which ended with the words: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."[102] On January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience at Apple's annual shareholders meeting held in the Flint Auditorium at De Anza College.[103][104] Macintosh engineer Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as "pandemonium".[105] The Macintosh was inspired by the Lisa (in turn inspired by Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface),[106][107] and it was widely acclaimed by the media with strong initial sales.[108][109] However, its low performance and limited range of available software led to a rapid sales decline in the second half of 1984.[108][109][110]
Sculley's and Jobs's respective visions for the company greatly differed. Sculley favored open architecture computers like the Apple II, targeting education, small business, and home markets less vulnerable to IBM. Jobs wanted the company to focus on the closed architecture Macintosh as a business alternative to the IBM PC. President and CEO Sculley had little control over chairman of the board Jobs's Macintosh division; it and the Apple II division operated like separate companies, duplicating services.[111] Although its products provided 85% of Apple's sales in early 1985, the company's January 1985 annual meeting did not mention the Apple II division or employees. Many left, including Wozniak, who stated that the company had "been going in the wrong direction for the last five years" and sold most of his stock.[112] Though frustrated with the company's and Jobs's dismissal of the Apple II in favor of the Macintosh, Wozniak left amicably and remained an honorary employee of Apple, maintaining a lifelong friendship with Jobs.[113][114][115]
By early 1985, the Macintosh's failure to defeat the IBM PC became clear,[108][109] and it strengthened Sculley's position in the company. In May 1985, Sculley—encouraged by Arthur Rock—decided to reorganize Apple, and proposed a plan to the board that would remove Jobs from the Macintosh group and put him in charge of "New Product Development". This move would effectively render Jobs powerless within Apple.[116] In response, Jobs then developed a plan to get rid of Sculley and take over Apple. However, Jobs was confronted after the plan was leaked, and he said that he would leave Apple. The Board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider. Sculley also told Jobs that he had all of the votes needed to go ahead with the reorganization. A few months later, on September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted a letter of resignation to the Apple Board. Five additional senior Apple employees also resigned and joined Jobs in his new venture, NeXT.[117]
The Macintosh's struggle continued after Jobs left Apple. Though marketed and received in fanfare, the expensive Macintosh was hard to sell.[118]: 308–309 In 1985, Bill Gates's then-developing company, Microsoft, threatened to stop developing Mac applications unless it was granted "a license for the Mac operating system software. Microsoft was developing its graphical user interface ... for DOS, which it was calling Windows and didn't want Apple to sue over the similarities between the Windows GUI and the Mac interface."[118]: 321 Sculley granted Microsoft the license which later led to problems for Apple.[118]: 321 In addition, cheap IBM PC clones that ran Microsoft software and had a graphical user interface began to appear. Although the Macintosh preceded the clones, it was far more expensive, so "through the late 1980s, the Windows user interface was getting better and better and was thus taking increasingly more share from Apple".[118]: 322 Windows-based IBM-PC clones also led to the development of additional GUIs such as IBM's TopView or Digital Research's GEM,[118]: 322 and thus "the graphical user interface was beginning to be taken for granted, undermining the most apparent advantage of the Mac...it seemed clear as the 1980s wound down that Apple couldn't go it alone indefinitely against the whole IBM-clone market".[118]: 322
Following his resignation from Apple in 1985, Jobs founded NeXT Inc.[119] with $7 million. A year later he was running out of money, and he sought venture capital with no product on the horizon. Eventually, Jobs attracted the attention of billionaire Ross Perot, who invested heavily in the company.[120] The NeXT computer was shown to the world in what was considered Jobs's comeback event,[121] a lavish invitation-only gala launch event[122] that was described as a multimedia extravaganza.[123] The celebration was held at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, October 12, 1988. Steve Wozniak said in a 2013 interview that while Jobs was at NeXT he was "really getting his head together".[99]
NeXT workstations were first released in 1990 and priced at $9,999 (equivalent to about $23,000 in 2023). Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced and designed for the education sector but was largely dismissed as cost prohibitive.[124] 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. Making use of a NeXT computer, English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 at CERN in Switzerland.[125]
The revised, second generation NeXTcube was released in 1990. 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.[126] Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the development of and attention to NeXTcube's magnesium case.[127] 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.[128] The company reported its first yearly profit of $1.03 million in 1994.[129] 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,[128] MobileMe services, and the iTunes Store.[130]
In 1986, Jobs funded the spinout of 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 and $5 million of which was paid to Lucasfilm for technology rights.[131]
The first film produced by Pixar with its Disney partnership, Toy Story (1995), with Jobs credited as executive producer,[132] brought financial success and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released. Over the course of Jobs's life, 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), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Cars 2 (2011). Brave (2012), Pixar's first film to be produced since Jobs's death, honored him with a tribute for his contributions to the studio.[133] Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, and Brave each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001.[134][135]
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,[136] and in January 2004, Jobs announced that he would never deal with Disney again.[137]
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.[138] Jobs's holdings in Disney far exceeded those of Eisner, who holds 1.7%, and of Disney family member Roy E. Disney, who until his 2009 death held about 1% 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.[138][139][140] Upon Jobs's death his shares in Disney were transferred to the Steven P. Jobs Trust led by Laurene Jobs.[141]
After Jobs's death, Iger recalled in 2019 that many warned him about Jobs, "that he would bully me and everyone else". Iger wrote, "Who wouldn't want Steve Jobs to have influence over how a company is run?", and that as an active Disney board member "he rarely created trouble for me. Not never but rarely." He speculated that they would have seriously considered merging Disney and Apple had Jobs lived.[137] Floyd Norman, of Pixar, described Jobs as a "mature, mellow individual" who never interfered with the creative process of the filmmakers.[142] In early June 2014, Pixar cofounder and Walt Disney Animation Studios President Edwin Catmull revealed that Jobs once advised him to "just explain it to them until they understand" in disagreements. Catmull released the book Creativity, Inc. in 2014, in which he recounts numerous experiences of working with Jobs. Regarding his own manner of dealing with Jobs, Catmull writes:[143]
In all the 26 years with Steve, Steve and I never had one of these loud verbal arguments, and it's not my nature to do that. ... but we did disagree fairly frequently about things. ... I would say something to him and he would immediately shoot it down because he could think faster than I could. ... I would then wait a week ... I'd call him up, and I give my counterargument to what he had said, and he'd immediately shoot it down. So I had to wait another week, and occasionally this went on for months. But ultimately one of three things happened. About a third of the time he said, "Oh, I get it, you're right", and that was the end of it. And it was another third of the time in which [I'd] say, "Actually I think he is right". The other third of the time, where we didn't reach consensus, he just let me do it my way, never said anything more about it.[143]
In 1996, Jobs's former company Apple was struggling and its survival depended on completing its next operating system. After failed negotiations to purchase Be Inc.,[144][145] Apple eventually came to a deal with NeXT in December[146] for $400 million; the deal was finalized in February 1997, bringing Jobs back to the company he had cofounded.[147] Jobs became de facto chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997. He was formally named interim chief executive on September 16.[148] In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs terminated several 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."[149] Jobs 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.[150] Jobs quipped at the time that he would be using the title "iCEO".[151]
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 nurturing open-ended innovation, Jobs also reminded his employees that "real artists ship".[152]
Jobs had a public war of words with Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, starting in 1987, when Jobs first criticized Dell for making "un-innovative beige boxes".[153] On October 6, 1997, at a Gartner Symposium, when Dell was asked what he would do if he ran the then-troubled Apple Computer company, he said: "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders".[154] Then, in 2006, Jobs emailed all employees when Apple's market capitalization rose above Dell's. It read:
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.[155]
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.[156]
Jobs usually went to work wearing a black long-sleeved mock turtleneck made by Issey Miyake, Levi's 501 blue jeans, and New Balance 991 sneakers.[157][158] Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson "...he came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, both because of its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style".[157]
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In 2001, Jobs was granted stock options in the amount of 7.5 million shares of Apple with an exercise price of $18.30. It was alleged that the options had been backdated, and that the exercise price should have been $21.10. It was further alleged that Jobs had thereby incurred taxable income of $20,000,000 that he did not report, and that Apple overstated its earnings by that same amount. As a result, Jobs potentially faced a number of criminal charges and civil penalties. The case was the subject of active criminal and civil government investigations,[159] though an independent internal Apple investigation completed on December 29, 2006, found that Jobs was unaware of these issues and that the options granted to him were returned without being exercised in 2003.[160]
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. The banner read "Steve, don't be a mini-player—recycle all e-waste".[161]
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.[162] The success of Apple's unique products and services provided several years of stable financial returns, propelling Apple to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company in 2011.[163]
Jobs was perceived as a demanding perfectionist[164][165] who always aspired to position his businesses and their products at the forefront of the information technology industry by foreseeing and setting innovation and style trends. He summed up this self-concept at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007, by quoting ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky:
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.[166]
On July 1, 2008, a $7 billion class action suit was filed against several members of the Apple board of directors for revenue lost because of alleged securities fraud.[167][168] In a 2011 interview with biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs revealed that he had met with US President Barack Obama, complained about the nation's shortage of software engineers, and told Obama that he was "headed for a one-term presidency".[169] Jobs proposed that any foreign student who got an engineering degree at a US university should automatically be offered a green card. After the meeting, Jobs commented, "The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done ... It infuriates me".[169]
In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid 2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas.[170] The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is very poor;[171] Jobs stated that he had a rare, less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.[170]
Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months,[172] in favor of alternative medicine. Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that."[173][174] Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,
