Steve Jobs

Pixar began as the Graphics Group of Lucasfilm's computer division, and George Lucas, needing money for a divorce, searched for investors to spin it out. President Edwin Catmull and co-founder Alvy Ray Smith had been declined by thirty-five venture capitalists and ten large corporations, including a General Motors deal that fell through three days before contracts were to be signed. Steve Jobs, freshly edged out of Apple in 1985 and building NeXT, made an offer Lucas initially considered too low; with no alternative buyers, Lucas accepted. On February 3, 1986, Jobs paid $5 million of his own money to Lucasfilm for the technology rights and put another $5 million in as capital, joining the board as chairman of the newly independent company incorporated in Richmond, California. Catmull stayed as president, Smith as executive vice president, and animator John Lasseter kept making the short demonstration films that would quietly define the studio's future.

The iTunes Store grew out of Jobs's push to open a legitimate digital marketplace for music as file sharing gutted CD sales. In 2002 he struck an agreement with the five major record labels to offer their catalogs through iTunes — at launch the only legal digital music source carrying all five — and introduced the iTunes Music Store at a special Apple music event in April 2003, opening for business on April 28, 2003, for Mac users, with a Windows version following that October. The store's model, selling individual songs rather than albums at a flat price that settled around ninety-nine cents, rewired label economics and consumer expectations alike. By April 2008 the iTunes Store was the largest music vendor in the United States, and by February 2010 the largest in the world, with first-quarter 2011 revenues near $1.4 billion and 35 billion songs sold by May 2014, before streaming finally overtook downloads in 2016.

Toy Story, the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was directed by John Lasseter from a story by Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Joe Ranft, released November 22, 1995, on a $30 million budget against a $401.2 million worldwide gross. The road there ran through Jobs's gamble: Lasseter had been fired from Disney after pitching The Brave Little Toaster as a computer-animated film, joined Lucasfilm's graphics group, and became a founding member of Pixar in 1986, creating short films to demonstrate the Image Computer. His 1988 short Tin Toy won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short, the first computer-generated film to do so, and drew Disney back. When Disney's Eisner and Katzenberg tried to rehire Lasseter, he chose to stay, telling co-founder Edwin Catmull he could go to Disney and be a director, or stay and make history. Katzenberg then structured the production deal that became Pixar's first feature.

The Apple Store chain was founded by Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson, with its first two locations opened on May 19, 2001. The move followed years of failed store-within-a-store concepts: seeing the need for better retail presentation of Apple's products, Jobs began an effort in 1997 to revamp the retail program and build a direct relationship with consumers, hiring Johnson from Target in 2000 to build the division. Media speculation at launch held that Apple would fail at retail; instead the stores bypassed the sales of competing nearby outlets and within three years reached $1 billion in annual sales, the fastest retailer in history to that mark. The stores sell, service, and repair Apple products, with the Genius Bar providing technical advice and same-day repairs as the signature service innovation. Apple has received design patents and architectural awards for the chain, notably its glass staircases and cubes, and rival consumer-electronics retailers lost traffic and margins to the format's perceived quality of service.

While developing the iPhone before its 2007 unveiling, Jobs did not intend to allow third-party native applications at all, directing outside developers to build web apps for the Safari browser instead. Developer backlash forced a reconsideration: in October 2007 Jobs announced that Apple would provide a software development kit by February 2008, and the SDK shipped March 6, 2008. Before the store opened, users could install third-party apps only by jailbreaking their phones, a thriving gray market that demonstrated demand Apple's founder had underestimated. The App Store opened July 10, 2008, with roughly 500 applications available, coinciding with the iPhone 3G's release a day later. In-app purchases arrived in 2009 and became the dominant monetization model, especially for games. Apple claims the App Store seeded the app economy and says it had paid developers over $320 billion by 2023, while the same record shows developers and regulators criticizing the thirty-percent commission as the excessive toll of a monopoly, including a 2021 Dutch finding that the commission structure was anti-competitive.

The iPod's development history credits Tony Fadell, who had shopped a music-player concept elsewhere before finding support at Apple and was hired in 2001 to run the project, code-named P-68. Jon Rubinstein had already secured the crucial component, discovering Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive during a supplier meeting in Japan and purchasing rights to it for Apple, where rivals' players relied on 2.5-inch drives; he had also progressed the screen and battery. With most Apple engineers busy on the iMac line, Fadell hired veterans from General Magic and Philips, partnered with PortalPlayer on the software, and had a working prototype within eight months. The physical design drew on Dieter Rams's 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio, the wheel interface on Bang & Olufsen's BeoCom telephone. Jobs set an exacting standard for the device's physical design, contracting Pixo to build the user interface under his direct supervision. Copywriter Vinnie Chieco named it, inspired by the pod-bay line from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The iPhone began in 2000 with Jobs's objection to the stylus. Envisioning an Apple touchscreen product a user could operate directly with fingers, he decided the device required a triple-layered capacitive multi-touch screen, then a very new and advanced technology, which would eliminate both the physical keyboard and the mouse, and he recruited a group of Apple engineers to investigate the idea as a side project. When Jobs reviewed the prototype and its interface, he saw the potential to turn the concept into a mobile phone competing in the emerging touchscreen market. The full effort, called Project Purple 2, began in 2005; Apple had quietly registered the iphone.org domain in December 1999. The development history records an eight-month secret collaboration with Cingular Wireless, estimated at $150 million over thirty months, in which Apple rejected the design-by-committee approach that had produced the failed Motorola ROKR E1 and instead was given liberty to develop the hardware and software entirely in-house.

Think different, Apple's advertising slogan from 1997 to 2002, was created by the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day and read widely as a riposte to IBM's Think. The campaign's birth was scrappy: in 1986 chief executive John Sculley had replaced Chiat/Day with BBDO, and in 1997, under Gil Amelio, BBDO pitched a brand campaign with the slogan We're back. Everyone in the room approved except the recently returned Jobs, who called the slogan stupid on the ground that Apple was not back yet. He then invited three agencies to present ideas reflecting the philosophy he wanted reinforced inside the company he had co-founded. Art director Craig Tanimoto coined the phrase, and Jobs insisted on different as a noun — think victory, think beauty, colloquial like think big — rejecting the grammatically safer think differently. The slogan was still printed on iMac packaging decades later.

The commercial that introduced the Macintosh was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and Lee Clow at the Chiat/Day agency, produced by Fairbanks Films in New York, and directed by Ridley Scott, on a budget reported between $370,000 and $900,000. A reference to George Orwell's 1949 novel of a dystopia ruled by a televised Big Brother, the sixty-second spot opens on rows of bald, grey-clad workers marching through a blue-gray tunnel of telescreens, intercut with a full-color athlete in red shorts and a white tank top bearing a Picasso-style drawing of the Macintosh, sprinting from four black-uniformed pursuers and hurling a brass-headed sledgehammer through the screen of Big Brother's rant. English athlete Anya Major played the heroine, and David Graham supplied Big Brother's voice. The ad closes by promising that the viewer will see why 1984 will not be like the novel's 1984 — Apple casting itself explicitly as the antidote to conformity.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, remembered as the two Steves, first met in mid-1971 when mutual friend Bill Fernandez introduced twenty-one-year-old Wozniak to sixteen-year-old Jobs. Their first partnership was the blue-box business: Wozniak built the tone devices after reading an Esquire article, once using one to call the Vatican while posing as Henry Kissinger, and Jobs managed to sell some two hundred of them at $150 apiece, splitting the profit evenly. By 1975 both had left their universities and were attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings, where machines like the Altair 8800 inspired Wozniak to build a microprocessor into his video terminal design. Priced-out of the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 chips, he waited until MOS Technology released its $20 6502 in 1976, wrote a BASIC for it, and adapted his paper design; by March 1, 1976, the machine that became the Apple I was working, and Jobs immediately saw its commercial potential where Wozniak had intended to share schematics for free.

Steven Paul Jobs, born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and raised by adoptive parents in what became Silicon Valley, built the defining founder arc of the personal computer age. With Steve Wozniak he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 to sell the Apple I, gained fame and wealth with the mass-produced Apple II, and pushed graphical computing into the mainstream with the 1984 Macintosh. The board removed him in 1985, and in exile he founded NeXT and bought the Lucasfilm graphics unit that became Pixar. Apple, near bankruptcy, acquired NeXT in 1997, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded; as chief executive he revived it with the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, and iPad, and by 2011 it stood among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in Palo Alto that October, at fifty-six.

NeXT, Inc. was founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder ousted earlier that year, and was headquartered in Redwood City, California. Jobs seeded it with $7 million of his own money and was running out of funds with no product on the horizon when billionaire Ross Perot, watching a television documentary about the company, invested heavily and joined its board. The company initially built workstation computers for higher education and business markets, with Jobs as chairman and chief executive, Avie Tevanian and Bud Tribble running engineering, and a corporate logo designed by Paul Rand. Wozniak later observed that during the NeXT years Jobs was really getting his head together. The venture became Jobs's twelve-year laboratory for the ideas Apple would later absorb: obsessive industrial design, object-oriented software, and an operating system durable enough to become the foundation of everything Apple shipped after 1997.

Jobs was born to Joanne Carole Schieble, an American Catholic of Swiss-German descent, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian Muslim graduate student pursuing a doctorate at Wisconsin, a pairing her father opposed. Arranging a closed adoption, Schieble traveled to San Francisco to give birth and asked that her son go to college graduates; when the selected lawyer and his wife withdrew upon learning the baby was a boy, Paul and Clara Jobs adopted him instead. Schieble initially refused to sign the papers and went to court, relenting only after the couple promised to pay for his college education. Paul Jobs, a high-school dropout turned Coast Guard mechanic and machinist, and Clara, a bookkeeper, moved the family to Mountain View. Jobs later bristled whenever they were called his adoptive parents and described them, in his own phrasing, as his real parents a thousand percent over.

In 1979 Xerox granted Apple access to its Palo Alto Research Center in exchange for the right to buy $1 million of Apple stock ahead of the IPO. Jobs and Apple colleagues visited PARC twice, in November and December 1979, and he was greatly impressed by the graphical user interface of the Xerox Alto, deciding on the spot to implement what he had seen in the Apple Lisa, the business machine under development since that July. Jobs led the Lisa effort from early 1980 until excessive technical demands disrupted it and he was removed from the project that September, which pushed him toward the Macintosh. Released in January 1983 at $9,995, the Lisa offered genuine innovation, windows and icons and a mouse, but its price and software isolation drove buyers away: more than $150 million went into development while only about 10,000 units sold, teaching Apple the cost lesson the Macintosh then had to solve.

The original business plan — selling the Pixar Image Computer, a high-end visualization machine — failed. Sales were inadequate, losses grew, and Jobs kept increasing his investment in exchange for a larger stake, reducing management and employee ownership until his cumulative $50 million gave him control of the entire company. In April 1990 Pixar sold its hardware division to Vicom Systems, and early 1991 brought layoffs that cut the staff to roughly forty-two people, its original size. On March 6, 1991, Jobs bought the company outright from its employees and became full owner; he contemplated folding it into NeXT, but NeXT's co-founders refused. As late as 1994 he considered selling Pixar to Hallmark Cards, to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, or to Oracle chief Larry Ellison, and only after New York critics signaled that Toy Story would be a hit did he decide to give the studio another chance, take an active leadership role, and make himself chief executive.

Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, in a keynote at the Macworld Conference and Expo at Moscone West in San Francisco, telling the audience it was a day he had looked forward to for two and a half years and that Apple was going to reinvent the phone. He framed the product as three devices fused into one: an iPod with a widescreen touch interface, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Six weeks before release, after Jobs found his keys had scratched the plastic prototype in his pocket, the screen was switched to glass, with Corning supplying it and Foxconn winning the manufacturing bid. The iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007, at $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model with a two-year contract. Six of ten Americans surveyed knew of its release beforehand; thousands waited outside stores, and stock ran short within an hour.

Unveiled on October 23, 2001, after development in under a year, the first iPod was announced by Jobs as a Mac-compatible product with a five-gigabyte hard drive that put a thousand songs in your pocket. Priced at $399 and launched amid skepticism about a consumer-electronics pivot by a struggling computer maker, it sold more than 100,000 units before the end of 2001, and Fortune labeled it Apple's twenty-first-century Walkman. The device's real strategic weight emerged over the following half-decade: the iPod made Apple a major player in the music industry, set up the iTunes Music Store as the first mass-market legal download service, and trained tens of millions of customers to use Apple interfaces and buy Apple hardware in categories far from computers. Jobs later noted that Apple made little profit from song sales themselves — the store existed to sell iPods — a razor-and-blades inversion where the music subsidized the hardware, not the reverse.

NeXT unveiled its first computer at what observers treated as Jobs's comeback moment, a lavish invitation-only gala at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on October 12, 1988, described by attendees as a multimedia extravaganza. NeXT workstations first shipped in 1990 at $9,999 each, technologically advanced machines aimed at the education sector but largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive, a rerun of the Lisa's pricing problem. The workstation was known for technical strengths, chiefly its object-oriented software development system, and Jobs marketed it to financial, scientific, and academic buyers by highlighting experimental technologies like the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. The second-generation NeXTcube arrived in 1990, touted by Jobs as the first interpersonal computer that would replace the personal computer, its NeXTMail system sharing voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time.

The commercial's path to air was improvised. It first ran on December 31, 1983, in ten local outlets, including Twin Falls, Idaho, where Chiat/Day bought the last possible break before midnight on station KMVT so the spot would qualify for the 1984 Clio Awards. Its second and only national airing came on January 22, 1984, during the third quarter of CBS's Super Bowl XVIII telecast. Within Apple the ad had been a subject of contention — the board reportedly disliked it — but the single broadcast became a watershed event and, in the industry's judgment, a masterpiece. In 1995 the Clio Awards inducted it into their Hall of Fame, and Advertising Age placed it at the top of its list of the fifty greatest commercials ever made. Regis McKenna later judged the advertisement more successful than the Macintosh itself, an early lesson that Jobs's product launches were media events first.

The campaign's centerpiece, the sixty-second television spot known as Crazy Ones, ran black-and-white footage of seventeen twentieth-century figures, among them Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Ted Turner, Richard Branson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Thomas Edison, Buckminster Fuller, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Maria Callas, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Henson and Kermit, Martha Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso, closing on a young girl opening her eyes as if making a wish. Jobs's connections secured likeness rights from figures who never did advertising: he personally telephoned the families of Jim Henson and John F. Kennedy and flew to New York to visit Yoko Ono. Two narrations were recorded, one by Jobs and one by actor Richard Dreyfuss; though Lee Clow argued it would be powerful for Jobs to voice the spot as a symbol of reclaiming the brand, Jobs chose the Dreyfuss version on the morning of the first air date, saying the campaign was about Apple, not about himself. His own narration was played at Apple's internal memorial for him in 2011.

By the mid-1990s Apple's distress was existential. In 1995 the chief financial officer asked directors to find a buyer, judging the company no longer able to support itself, and resigned when the board refused; Fortune wrote in February 1996 that the company which invented the personal computer would likely disappear, noting that $1,000 invested in Apple a decade earlier was worth $2,900 against $22,000 in Compaq. Apple came hours from acquisition by Sun Microsystems, refused an IBM offer it later sought again, and failed to ship a modern operating system after the Copland project collapsed into feature creep. Choosing between Be's BeOS and NeXT, Apple announced on December 20, 1996, that it would purchase NeXT and its NeXTSTEP operating system for roughly $429 million plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, bringing Jobs back into management for the first time since 1985 and giving the Mac its next technological foundation.

In 1991, months after taking full ownership, Jobs closed a deal with Disney worth $26 million to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was Toy Story. Released in November 1995 as the first entirely computer-animated feature film, it grossed nearly $362 million worldwide in its initial run and brought both money and critical standing. Pixar went public on November 29, 1995, under the PIXR ticker on Nasdaq, and the offering outdid even Netscape's as the biggest of the year: the stock ran from $28 to $45 within its first half-hour, delaying trading on unmatched buy orders, and closed the day at $42. The offering converted Jobs's $50 million rescue of a failing hardware maker into a public animation studio, and his roughly 80 percent stake made him a billionaire on paper just as his other company, Apple, was descending toward its crisis.

Paul Jobs built a workbench in the family garage to pass along his love of mechanics, and his son admired the craftsmanship of a father who could build any cabinet or fence and handed him a hammer to work alongside. The childhood home on Crist Drive in Los Altos, bought in 1967 with the family's savings so Steve could reach the better Cupertino schools, later became the original site of Apple Computer and was added to historic-site lists in 2013. School was a poor fit: Jobs resisted authority, played pranks at Monta Loma Elementary, skipped a grade, and after bullying at Crittenden Middle School gave his parents an ultimatum to move or lose him to dropout. At thirteen he cold-called Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard asking for parts for a frequency-counter project, and Hewlett gave him a summer job. The neighborhood around Homestead High tied him early to Silicon Valley.

NeXT's modest sales understated its influence. Using a NeXT computer at CERN in Switzerland in 1990, the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, creating on that machine the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, while the NeXT environment also served as the development platform for the first web server, CERN httpd, and later for the video games Doom and Quake. The object-oriented NeXTSTEP development environment made rapid prototyping of exactly such applications practical, which is why the machine kept appearing at the origin points of 1990s software. Jobs's marketing of the NeXTcube as an interpersonal computer built for revolutionizing human communications and groupwork, a claim that looked like puffery when the hardware failed to sell, reads in retrospect as a description of what developers actually did with the platform — they built the internet's first generation on it.

At Homestead High, Jobs held two divergent interests, electronics and literature, a duality he traced to reading Polaroid founder Edwin Land on the importance of people who stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences. Bill Fernandez introduced him to Steve Wozniak in 1971, and Jobs visited Wozniak weekly at Berkeley, studying in nearby Stanford's student union and staging light shows for Homestead's avant-garde jazz program instead of joining the electronics club. A classmate remembered him as half brain and half hippie, smart enough for the nerds, too intellectual for the hippies, an individual where individuality was suspect. In his senior year he took a freshman English class at Stanford and read Shakespeare and Plato, King Lear above all. The friendship with Wozniak, five years older and already a self-taught engineer of rare gifts, became the technical-commercial pairing on which Apple would later be built.

Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, evident in the magnesium case of the NeXTcube, and the strain on the hardware division told: after selling only 50,000 machines, NeXT withdrew from hardware entirely in 1993 and transitioned to software with the release of NeXTSTEP for Intel processors, refashioning itself as NeXT Software. The company reported its first annual profit, $1.03 million, in 1994, and in 1996 released WebObjects, an early enterprise framework for building web applications that Apple would later use to run the Apple Store, MobileMe, and the iTunes Store. In 1997 Apple acquired NeXT for $427 million, returning Jobs to the company as an advisor before his elevation to chief executive. NeXTSTEP became the basis for Rhapsody and Mac OS X, whose Darwin core now underlies macOS and iOS, making the failed workstation company the software DNA of every Apple device sold since.

The original Disney arrangement rankled: Pixar created and produced the films, Disney marketed and distributed them, profits and costs split equally, but Disney kept all story, character, and sequel rights plus a distribution fee of 10 to 15 percent. Renewal talks through 2003 and 2004 failed repeatedly, and in January 2004 Jobs announced he would never deal with Disney again while Michael Eisner ran it. The deadlock broke when Bob Iger replaced Eisner in October 2005 and moved quickly to mend the relationship; on January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced Disney would buy Pixar in an all-stock deal worth $7.4 billion. The merger made Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder with about seven percent of the stock and a board seat, and his holdings passed on his death to the Steven P. Jobs Trust. Iger later wrote that Jobs rarely created trouble for him and speculated they would have explored merging Disney and Apple had Jobs lived.

At the August 1997 Macworld Expo in Boston, Jobs announced a partnership with Microsoft whose terms included a five-year commitment to keep releasing Microsoft Office for the Macintosh and a $150 million investment in Apple. The long-running patent dispute over whether Windows infringed Apple's interface rights was settled, and Internet Explorer would ship as the Mac's default browser. Jobs framed the deal for the audience as the end of an era of rivalry: for Apple to win, Apple had to do a really good job, and if others helped, so much the better. The money was largely symbolic — Apple's market capitalization stood at $2.46 billion the day before, with $1.7 billion in quarterly revenue and $1.2 billion in cash reserves — but the psychological effect was immediate, signaling that the returning founder would trade pride for survival, keep Office on the platform, and refocus the company on execution rather than litigation.

Around 1971, Wozniak read an Esquire article on the blue box, an illegal tone-generating device that tricked the telephone network into free long-distance calls, and designed a low-cost digital version. Jobs decided the pair should sell them and split the profit, and the clandestine sales went well enough that Jobs later credited the episode as the seed of Apple: without the blue boxes, he argued, there would have been no Apple at all, because the experience proved two young men could take on large companies and beat them. The episode fixed a division of labor that recurred at Apple — Wozniak as the inventor of elegant, minimal engineering, Jobs as the salesman who found the market, set the price, and captured the value. It also marked his first exercise of pricing power and margin thinking applied to somebody else's brilliant circuit design, skills he would spend four decades scaling from gadgets to global product lines.

While shutting down Apple's licensing of its operating system to clone manufacturers, one of Jobs's first moves as acting chief executive was to develop the iMac, which bought the company time to restructure. Introduced in 1998, the original iMac integrated the display and processor in a streamlined translucent plastic body and became a sales smash, moving roughly one million units each year. The machine reintroduced Apple to media and public and announced the company's new emphasis on design and aesthetics — its maker boasted that the back of their computer looked better than the front of anyone else's. It also made hard technical choices that rippled across the industry, dropping the floppy disk drive and standardizing on USB, which popularized USB among peripheral makers who began shipping translucent-plastic accessories to match. The iMac was the first proof, ahead of the iPod and iPhone, that Jobs's design-led product philosophy could be a mass-market financial engine rather than a niche taste.

In October 2001 Apple introduced the iPod, its first portable digital music player, launching as a five-gigabyte device capable of storing around a thousand songs. The financial effect was enormous. In the quarter ending March 26, 2005, Apple earned $290 million on sales of $3.24 billion, against $46 million on $1.91 billion in the same quarter a year earlier, and Jobs told developers in June 2005 that Apple's share of the entire portable music device market stood at 76 percent. The player used a 1.8-inch hard drive where rivals used 2.5-inch units, enabling the small size that defined it, and it sold for $399 with more than 100,000 units gone before the end of 2001. The iPod converted Apple from a computer maker into a consumer-electronics company, set up the iTunes Store, trained the market for the iPhone, and funded the research that followed.

In September 1972 Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, an expensive school he insisted on although his parents could ill afford it, drawn by its countercultural intensity. After a single semester he dropped out without telling them, unwilling to spend their money on an education that seemed meaningless, but stayed months longer auditing whatever interested him, including Robert Palladino's calligraphy course. In the 2005 Stanford commencement address he described sleeping on friends' dorm-room floors, returning Coke bottles for food money, and walking seven miles across town each Sunday for a free Hare Krishna meal. The audited calligraphy course resurfaced a decade later, when the Macintosh shipped with multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts that no rival machine offered, a connection Jobs treated as the clearest proof that dots can only be connected looking backward. The dropped-out-but-still-around posture became permanent parts of his founding mythology.

In May 2001 Apple announced its own retail stores, designed for two purposes: to stem its declining share of the computer market and to answer the poor presentation of Apple products at third-party outlets. On January 9, 2007, the company shortened its name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., Jobs telling the Macworld Expo audience that with the iPod, Apple TV, and the Mac, Apple was no longer just a computer company; the same keynote revealed the iPhone, combining a widescreen iPod, visual voicemail, and an internet communicator running a full browser. The iPhone went on sale June 29, 2007. The iPad was announced January 27, 2010, reaching stores that April, and rather than cannibalizing Mac sales produced a halo effect that lifted iMac and MacBook demand. On May 26, 2010, Apple's stock market value overtook Microsoft's; that quarter its revenues passed Microsoft's too, the first such reversal in two decades.

Back home in 1974, Jobs took a technician job at Atari in Los Gatos, where co-founder Nolan Bushnell judged him difficult but valuable, often the smartest person in the room and eager to let people know it. Mid-year he left for seven months in India seeking guru Neem Karoli Baba, whose ashram he found nearly deserted because the teacher had died, and returned with a shaved head, Indian clothes, and a commitment to Zen Buddhism under Kobun Chino Otogawa, including long retreats at the Tassajara mountain monastery. At Atari in 1975 Bushnell assigned him the Breakout circuit-board job, offering a bounty for every chip eliminated; Wozniak, sketching by day at HP, cut the design to forty-five chips inside four days. Jobs reported a $750 payout and split it with Wozniak, who learned only a decade later the actual bonus had been $5,000, an early glimpse of the transactional edge beneath the idealism.

By March 1976 Wozniak had finished the basic design of the Apple I and showed it to Jobs, who proposed they sell it despite Wozniak's initial skepticism. On April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak, and administrative overseer Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company as a partnership in the Crist Drive house, the operation starting in Jobs's bedroom and moving to the garage; Wayne exited within days, leaving the two Steves as the active co-founders. The name came from Jobs's stay at the All One Farm commune in Oregon. To fund the first boards, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen van. The plan was fifty-dollar bare circuit boards for hobbyists until retailer Paul Terrell ordered fifty fully assembled units at $500 each; roughly 200 Apple I computers were ultimately produced, enough to convert a garage project into a company with revenue and a roadmap.

Apple's first outside money came from Mike Markkula, a semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer, who also brought the company to investor Arthur Rock; after seeing the crowded Apple booth at the Homebrew Computer Show, Rock started with a $60,000 investment and joined the board. Markkula next recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as Apple's first president and chief executive in February 1977, a decision Jobs openly disliked, an early lesson that professional managers rather than founders were running the corporate show. The pattern repeated across Jobs's career: he recruited or inherited successive chief executives, from Scott through Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio, before taking the title himself in 1997 and holding it until weeks before his death. The Markkula-Scott phase professionalized bookkeeping, inventory, and channel strategy while the founders kept product control, the division of authority whose collapse later produced the 1985 rupture.

Jobs and Wozniak took the wraps off the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, the first consumer product sold by Apple and one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers in the world. Wozniak designed the machine; Jobs oversaw its unusual case, and Rod Holt engineered its novel power supply. During development the two fought over expansion slots, Jobs wanting two for simplicity and Wozniak eight for flexibility, nearly splitting before settling on eight, an argument that previewed their lifelong disagreement about whether elegance or openness should win. The Apple II carried the company through its first growth decade, built the personal computer market for schools, small businesses, and homes, and made Jobs wealthy young: he was worth over $1 million at twenty-three and an estimated $250 million at twenty-five, among the youngest self-made names ever to reach the Forbes list of the nation's richest people.

In 1983 Jobs recruited John Sculley, president of Pepsi-Cola, to become Apple's chief executive with the famous pitch contrasting a career spent selling sugared water with a chance to change the world. The hire was meant to give the founder operational cover while he focused on the Macintosh; instead it created a rival power center with board backing. Their visions diverged sharply: Sculley favored open-architecture machines like the Apple II aimed at education, small business, and home markets less exposed to IBM, while Jobs wanted the closed-architecture Macintosh positioned as the business alternative to the IBM PC. The two divisions operated like separate companies, duplicating services, and the January 1985 annual meeting failed even to mention the Apple II group still providing 85 percent of sales, an omission that helped push Wozniak to leave amicably, sell most of his stock, and complain the company had been heading wrong for five years.

Jobs took over the Macintosh project in 1981 from Jef Raskin, who had conceived it, exploiting Wozniak's leave after a plane crash to seize control of the program. On January 22, 1984, Apple aired the Ridley Scott-directed commercial titled 1984 during the Super Bowl, and two days later an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh at the Flint Auditorium shareholders meeting to what engineer Andy Hertzfeld described as pandemonium, the first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface and mouse, priced at $2,495 and bundled with MacWrite and MacPaint. Initial acclaim and strong early sales collapsed in the second half of 1984 on low performance and a thin software library. The machine's redemption came in 1985 through desktop publishing: paired with the LaserWriter, the first laser printer with vector PostScript graphics, and Aldus PageMaker, the Macintosh launched an entire industry and kept Apple the second-largest personal computer maker into the 1990s.

By early 1985 the Macintosh's failure to dent the IBM PC had strengthened Sculley's hand. In May, encouraged by director Arthur Rock, Sculley proposed reorganizing Apple to strip Jobs of the Macintosh group and park him over new-product development, a role that would have rendered the founder decorative. Jobs answered with a plan of his own to oust Sculley, but the scheme leaked; confronted, Jobs said he would leave, and the board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider, while Sculley made clear he held the votes. On September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted his letter of resignation to the board, and five senior Apple employees resigned with him to join his next venture. The ouster became the hinge of his biography: twelve years in exile, then a return with the operating system, the design taste, and the scar tissue that would save Apple.

Apple acquired NeXT in December 1996, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded, and after the board ousted Gil Amelio as chief executive on July 9, 1997, Jobs became de facto leader, formally interim chief executive on September 16. He moved fast: in March 1998 he terminated the Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc projects to concentrate resources on returning to profitability, and employees joked darkly about sharing an elevator with him in case the doors opened without their jobs, his summary executions being rare but a handful sufficing to terrorize a company. He rewrote the Macintosh clone licensing program to make it prohibitively costly, ending the clonemakers' free ride on the Mac OS. Much of NeXT's technology, most importantly NeXTSTEP, was folded into what became Mac OS X. At Macworld in January 2000 he dropped the interim label and quipped about serving as iCEO, the pun marking a permanent restoration.

Jobs's design aesthetic drew on the Zen Buddhism he studied in India and under Kobun Chino Otogawa, and on his stated ambition, echoing Edwin Land, to stand where humanities meet sciences. Wozniak insisted Jobs never coded and did no original engineering; early employee Daniel Kottke likewise cast Wozniak as the innovator and Jobs as the marketing mind. Yet Jobs is named as inventor or co-inventor on 346 United States patents and applications spanning devices, touch interfaces, keyboards, adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, and packaging, with roughly 200 shared with design chief Jonathan Ive, and his contributions concentrated on the look and feel of products rather than utility-patent engineering. Even hospitalized and terminally ill he sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed and redrew an oxygen monitor for simplicity. Since his death he has been granted 141 further patents, bringing his total beyond 450.

In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, and in mid-2004 he told employees he had a tumor in his pancreas — a rare, less aggressive islet-cell neuroendocrine type, distinct from the usually fatal form of the disease. Biographer Walter Isaacson reported that Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for nine months, trying a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and treatments found online, before undergoing a Whipple procedure in July 2004 that appeared to remove the tumor; he received no chemotherapy or radiation, and Tim Cook ran the company meanwhile. Speculation mounted as his keynotes turned gaunt, and in August 2008 Bloomberg briefly published a prepared obituary with blanks for age and cause of death, which Jobs answered by paraphrasing Mark Twain on exaggerated reports of his death, then closed another presentation with a slide reading 110/70, his blood pressure. In January 2009 he took a six-month leave; Cook, who shared his rare blood type, offered a portion of his own liver and was refused. Jobs underwent a liver transplant in Memphis that April, with a prognosis described as excellent.

On January 17, 2011, Apple announced another medical leave so Jobs could focus on his health, with Cook again running day-to-day operations while Jobs stayed involved in major strategic decisions. He still appeared at the iPad 2 launch on March 2, presented iCloud at the developers' conference on June 6, and pitched Apple's proposed new campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7. On August 24, 2011, he resigned as chief executive, writing to the board that if there ever came a day when he could no longer meet his duties and expectations, he would be the first to let them know, and that unfortunately that day had come. He became chairman and named Cook his successor, and worked for Apple until the day before his death. He died at home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, of respiratory arrest from a relapse of the tumor, his sister Mona Simpson reporting that his final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables repeated three times. Flags flew at half-staff at Apple and Microsoft; California declared October 16 Steve Jobs Day.

Jobs kept his giving private and thin. Shortly after leaving Apple in 1985 he formed the Steven P. Jobs Foundation to focus on nutrition and vegetarianism, but closed it within the year as NeXT absorbed him; on returning to Apple in 1997 he eliminated the company's philanthropic programs, which were never restored, and Stanford Social Innovation Review later listed Apple among America's least philanthropic companies. He declined to sign the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010. He gave $50 million to Stanford's hospital, and Bono credited Apple-driven efforts with tens of millions of dollars for AIDS and HIV relief in Africa that inspired other companies to join. His honors tell the public story: the National Medal of Technology in 1985, awarded jointly with Wozniak by President Reagan; Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Decade in 1989; Fortune's most powerful person in business in 2007; and, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden in 2022 and induction as a Disney Legend in 2013.

Observers on both sides described Jobs's power of persuasion as a reality distortion field, on fullest display in the keynote addresses nicknamed Stevenotes at Macworld Expos and developer conferences. He wore a daily uniform of an Issey Miyake black mock turtleneck, Levi's 501 jeans, and New Balance sneakers, telling biographer Walter Isaacson he liked the daily convenience and the signature style of a personal uniform. He closed his January 2007 Macworld keynote by quoting hockey star Wayne Gretzky's line about skating to where the puck is going to be rather than where it has been, and applied it to Apple's whole history. His long public feud with Michael Dell ran from a 1987 jab about un-innovative beige boxes through Dell's 1997 advice to shut Apple down and return money to shareholders; when Apple's market value passed Dell's in 2006, Jobs emailed staff a short, gleeful note that Dell had proven imperfect at predicting the future.

Delivered at Stanford Stadium on June 12, 2005, Jobs's commencement address is remembered by the Steve Jobs Archive as one of the most influential commencement speeches in history, watched more than 120 million times and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world. The Archive's twentieth-anniversary essay notes the talk's improbable afterlife: LeBron James played a clip of it in the Cleveland Cavaliers locker room before a critical game of the 2016 NBA Finals comeback. Its ingredients were unpromising — a fifteen-minute address by a college dropout to graduates of a top research university, a talk aimed at twenty-two-year-olds that warns they will gradually become the old and be cleared away, a text shadowed by the speaker's cancer diagnosis. Yet the speech became the canonical statement of the Jobs philosophy of work and mortality, endlessly quoted for its closing admonition to stay hungry and stay foolish.

Stanford was not Jobs's audience's first choice; the students had wanted comedian Jon Stewart, who had given a popular address the year before, with Arnold Schwarzenegger third. The Archive recounts that in the six months between president John Hennessy's invitation and commencement, Jobs sent himself notes, outlines, and drafts; he ignored the suggestions of Apple's public-relations staff, requested ideas from the four senior class co-presidents and never replied, and asked friends for advice. In the final weeks before graduation he wrote the speech himself, working in close consultation with his wife Laurene. On a scorching day, in jeans, a black shirt, and Birkenstocks under his robe, he showed one sign of nerves only to those who knew him well: he read the text verbatim. Days afterward the class co-presidents emailed their thanks, and Jobs replied that it had been really hard to prepare for, and that he had loved it, especially when it was over.

The Archive frames the address as Jobs's humanist manifesto delivered as something disarmingly plain — three stories drawn from his own life. Beneath the plain structure — dropping out of Reed, being fired from Apple, facing a cancer diagnosis — the essay finds fundamental truths that make us human: love, death, fear, authenticity, hope. It observes that the speech is by a technology founder who scarcely mentions technology, and connects this to an interview Jobs gave a few years earlier, in which he complained that the whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side, insisting that people forget they are unique, with unique feelings and perspectives. The three stories, culminating in the report of his diagnosis and the reflection that remembering death is the best defense against the trap of living someone else's life, form the closest thing Jobs left to a written credo.