History of Steve Jobs (Full Documentary)
Steve Jobs was born on 24th February 1955 in San Francisco California. His birth parents had to give up Steve due to being too young at the time and not wanting to get married. Having a child out of wedlock had a strong stigma in the 50’s, so Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. In 1961 the family moved to Mountain View, California. This area, just south of Palo Alto, California, was becoming the hub for electronics such as radios, televisions, stereos, and computers. At that time people started to refer to the area as "Silicon Valley." Paul Jobs was a machinist and fixed cars as a hobby.
Jobs remembers his father as being very skilled at working with his hands. Paul built a workbench in his garage for his son to "pass along his love of mechanics”. Steve often found it difficult in making friends his own age and struggled to function in a traditional classroom. He resisted authority figures, frequently misbehaved and was suspended a few times. Jobs later said himself he was “pretty bored in school and had turned into a little terror..” He regularly played pranks on others at Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View.
Although Jobs credited his fourth grade teacher with turning him around: "It took her about a month to get hip to my situation. She bribed me into learning. She would say, 'I really want you to finish this workbook. I'll give you five bucks if you finish it.' That kindled a passion in me for learning! I learned more that year than I think I learned in any other year in school. They wanted me to skip the next two years in grade school and go straight to junior high to learn a foreign language, but my parents very wisely wouldn't let it happen.” Jobs did skip the fifth grade and transferred to the 6th grade at Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View. However, this transition led to Jobs being bullied,
he then gave his parents an ultimatum, take him out of Crittenden or he would drop out of school. His parents used all their savings in 1967 to buy a new house which would allow Jobs to change schools. Their new house on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California would later become a key figure in Apple’s history. Whilst Jobs started studying at Cupertino Junior High. A fellow electronics hobbyist, Bill Fernandez, from Cupertino Junior High, became his first friend. Fernandez later commented that "for some reason the kids in the eighth grade didn't like Steve because they thought he was odd. I was one of his few friends." Fernandez eventually
introduced Jobs to electronics whiz Steve Wozniak, who lived across the street from Fernandez. As a child, Jobs preferred doing things by himself. He swam competitively but was not interested in team sports or other group activities. He spent a lot of time working in the garage workshop of a neighbour who worked at Hewlett-Packard, an electronics manufacturer. Jobs also enrolled in the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Club where he saw engineers demonstrate new products, and he saw his first computer at the age of twelve. He was impressed and knew immediately that he wanted to work with computers. While in high school Jobs attended lectures
at the Hewlett-Packard plant. On one occasion he boldly asked William Hewlett, the president, for some parts he needed to complete for a class project. Hewlett was impressed, he gave Jobs the parts and offered him a summer internship at Hewlett-Packard. Jobs said “He didn't know me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that summer working at Hewlett-Packard on the line, assembling frequency counters...well,
assembling may be too strong. I was putting in screws. It didn't matter; I was in heaven.” 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. He began his first year there in late 1968. During mid-1970, Steve went through a period of change, he said "I got stoned for the first time; I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and all that classic stuff. I read Moby Dick and went back
as a junior taking creative writing classes." From that point, Jobs developed two different circles of friends, those involved in electronics and engineering and those interested in art and literature. 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.
He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of a brain and kind of a 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." Paul and Clara Jobs had made a pledge when they adopted Steve that they would send him to college. So they had worked hard and saved dutifully for his college fund, which was modest but adequate by the time he graduated.
However Jobs, becoming ever more wilful minded, did not make it easy. At first he toyed with not going to college at all. “I think I might have headed to New York if I didn’t go to college,” When his parents pushed him to go to college, he responded in a passive-aggressive way. He did not consider state schools, such as Berkeley, where Steve Wozniak was, despite that they were more affordable. Nor did he look at Stanford, just up the road and likely to offer a scholarship. “The kids who went to Stanford, they already knew what they wanted to do,” he said. “They weren’t really artistic. I wanted something that was more artistic and interesting.”
Instead he insisted on applying only to Reed College, a private liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, that was one of the most expensive in the nation. He was visiting Steve Wozniak at Berkeley when his father called to say an acceptance letter had arrived from Reed, he tried to talk Steve out of going there. So did his mother. It was more than they could afford but similarly their son responded with an ultimatum: If he couldn’t go to Reed, he wouldn’t go anywhere. They relented, as usual. Reed was known for its free-spirited hippie
lifestyle, which combined somewhat uneasily with its rigorous academic standards. Steve enrolled at Reed to study Physics and Philosophy. Chirssan Brennan remained involved with Jobs while he was at Reed. However Steve soon decided to drop out of Reed College. He liked being at Reed however he didn’t enjoy having to attend the required classes. Jobs continued to attend classes he enjoyed like calligraphy. During that time the relationship between Jobs and Brennan broke down.
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.” In 1972 Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Jobs decided that they could make money selling it. The two stopped making the boxes after they were nearly caught by the police. Despite giving up on the venture, they reportedly made about $6000 selling the blue boxes. Jobs said that if not for the blue boxes,
there would have been no Apple. And that they could take on large companies and beat them. In mid-1973, when Jobs was 18 he moved back to the San Francisco area and began renting his own apartment. Brennan and Jobs relationship was complicated by this stage. Jobs hitchhiked and worked around the West Coast and Brennan would occasionally join him. Brennan wrote this in her dairy, "little by little, Steve and I separated. But we were never able to fully let go. We never talked about breaking up or going our separate ways and we didn't have that conversation where one person says it's over." They continued to grow apart, but Jobs would still seek her out, and visit her while she was working in a health food store or as a live-in babysitter.
In 1973, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong. After finishing it, Wozniak gave the board to Jobs, who then took the game down to Atari in Los Gatos. Atari thought that Jobs had built it and gave him a job as a technician. Later Atari’s co-founder said "The truth is that very few companies would hire Steve, even today. Why? Because he was an outlier. To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing. Steve was difficult but
valuable. He was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that." By early 1974, Jobs was living what Brennan describes as a "simple life" in a Los Gatos cabin, working at Atari and saving money for his impending trip to India. One of his friends had been to India and he was urging jobs to take his spiritual journey there too. He ended up reaching the foothills of Himaya after days of traveling by train and bus. That’s where he was supposed to see Neem Karoli Baba but by the time Jobs got there he had passed away. Despite the setback, Jobs still spent seven months in India exploring his spirituality.
He said, “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition and their intuition is more developed than the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work” After staying seven months, Jobs left India and returned to the US. Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved and he wore traditional Indian clothing. Over this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his experimentation with LSD “a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced
my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” Jobs and Brennan both became practitioners of Zen Buddhism. Jobs was living with his parents again, in their backyard tool-shed which he had converted into a bedroom with a sleeping bag, mat, books, a candle, and a meditation pillow. He considered taking up monastic residence in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen. Jobs would later say that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking. Jobs then returned to Atari and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each TTL chip that was eliminated
in the machine. Jobs himself had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if he could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the TTL chip count from 96 to 46, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the $5,000 paid out), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350. It was only later that Wozniak found out about this to which he said "I cried, I cried quite a bit when I read that in a book." It was around this time that 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.
In 1976, Wozniak designed and developed the Apple I computer and showed it to Jobs, who suggested that they sell it. Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs's Los Altos home on Crist Drive. The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California's Menlo Park from 1975. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there - which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards. Wozniak was inspired by MITS'
build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. Wozniak went on to produce the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen. It was later christened the Apple I and was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn't trying to change the world with what he'd made - he just wanted to show off how much he'd managed to do with so little resources. The two decided on the name "Apple" after Jobs returned from the All One Farm commune in Oregon and told Wozniak about his time spent in the farm's apple orchard. Neighbours on Crist Drive had described Jobs as an odd individual who would greet his clients "with his underwear hanging out, barefoot and hippie-like."
Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop with the Apple I, who said they would be interested in the machine, but only if it came fully assembled. The owner, Paul Terrell, went further, saying he would order 50 of the machines and pay US $500 each on delivery. Jobs then took the purchase order that he had been given from the Byte Shop to Cramer Electronics, a national electronic parts distributor, and ordered the components he needed to assemble the Apple I Computer. The local credit manager asked Jobs how he was going to pay for the parts. Jobs explained about his purchase order from the Byte Shop which was cash on delivery. Jobs persuaded
Cramer Electronics to give him the parts on credit and would pay him once he delivered the computers. Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they'd been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found. Terrell had essentially received only the motherboard of the computer. Customers would have to provide the keyboard, power supply and TV to actually use the Apple I. Although Terrell was upset by this, he still accepted and paid for the units. Not to mention giving Jobs an idea of what the next Apple computer should be like.
After the Apple I’s success, the business was in need of investment. They had used a variety of methods, including selling various prized items like Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs' VW bus. Jobs started looking for cash, but banks were reluctant to lend him money; the idea of a computer for ordinary people seemed absurd at the time. Co-Founder Ronald Wayne became hesitant about the business due to a failed venture four years earlier and soon dropped out of the company, leaving the two Steves as the active primary co-founders. In 1977 Jobs eventually met Mike Markkula, an American businessman and investor who co-signed a bank loan for $250,000 (equivalent to $1,080,000 in 2017). Markkula brought his business expertise along with his money and became a one-third owner of Apple and employee number 3.
Steve Wozniak, later credits Markkula for the success of Apple more than himself. Meanwhile Chrisann Brennan returned from her own journey in India and she visited Jobs at his parents' home where he was still living. It was during this period that Jobs and Brennan fell in love again, as she noted changes in him that she attributes to Kobun, a Zen priest that had mentored Jobs. It was also at this time that Jobs displayed a prototype Apple computer for Brennan and his parents in their living room. By the early 1977, she and Jobs would spend time together at her home at Duveneck Ranch in Los Altos, which served as a hostel and environmental education center. Brennan also worked there as a teacher for children who came to learn about the farm. Wozniak and Jobs had soon moved on from the Apple I. Many of the design features of the
computer were due to the limited amount of money they had to construct the prototype, but with the income from the sales of the Apple I and recent investment. They were able to start construction of a greatly improved machine, the Apple II; the two Steves presented it to the public at the first West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977. The main difference internally was a completely redesigned TV interface, which held the display in memory. Now not only useful for simple text display, the Apple II included graphics and, eventually, colour. Jobs meanwhile pressed for a much improved case and keyboard, with the idea that the machine should be complete and ready to run out of the box. Jobs usually went to work wearing a black long-sleeved mock turtleneck, blue Levi jeans, and New Balance 991 sneakers. He said his choice was inspired by that of Stuart Geman,
a noted applied mathematics professor at Brown University. Jobs liked the idea of having a uniform for its daily convenience and maintaining a signature style. 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, while Brennan and Jobs moved into a house near the Apple office in Cupertino.
Brennan eventually took a position in the shipping department at Apple. The relationship between Brennan and Jobs was deteriorating as his position with Apple grew, and she began to consider ending the relationship through small changes. In October 1977, Brennan was approached by Rod Holt who was Apple’s 5th employee and developed the unique power supply for the Apple II, who asked her to take "a paid apprenticeship designing blueprints for the Apples." Both Holt and Jobs felt 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 never wanted to ask her to get an abortion. But he also refused to discuss the pregnancy with her. Brennan herself felt confused about what to do. She did not feel comfortable with the idea of having an abortion. She chose instead to
discuss the matter with Kobun, who encouraged her to keep the baby and pledged his support. Meanwhile, Holt was waiting for her decision on the internship. Brennan stated that Jobs continued to encourage her to take the job by saying, ”be pregnant and work at Apple, you can take the job. I don't get what the problem is." Brennan however notes that she felt so ashamed at the thought of having a growing belly in a professional work environment with the child being Jobs. Brennan turned down the internship and decided to leave Apple. She stated that Jobs told her
"If you give up this baby for adoption, you will be sorry" and "I am never going to help you.” She would sometimes ask Jobs for money but he always refused. Brennan hid her pregnancy for as long as she could, living in a variety of homes and continuing her work with Zen meditation. At the same time, according to Brennan, Jobs started to spread rumours that she slept around and he couldn’t conceive a child as he was infertile. A few weeks before she was due to give birth, Brennan was invited to deliver her baby at the All One Farm and she accepted the offer. When Jobs was 23 (the same age as his biological parents when they had him) Brennan gave birth to her baby, Lisa Brennan, on May 17, 1978.
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. She also stated that she never gave him permission to use the baby's name for a computer and he hid the plans from her. Jobs also worked with his team to come up with the phrase, "Local Integrated Software Architecture" as an alternative explanation for the Apple Lisa. Decades later, however, Jobs
admitted to his biographer Walter Isaacson that "obviously, it was named for my daughter". When Jobs denied paternity, a DNA test established him as Lisa's father. It required him to give Brennan $385 a month in addition to returning the welfare money she had received. Jobs gave her $500 a month at the time when Apple went public, as Jobs became a millionaire. On December 12, 1980, Apple launched the Initial Public Offering of its stock to the investing public. It generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly created more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history. Several venture capitalists
cashed out, reaping billions in long-term capital gains. Jobs was worth over $1 million in 1978 when he was just 23 years old. This grew to over $250 million by the time he was 25. 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.
While the Apple II was already established as a successful business-ready platform because of Visicalc, Apple was not content. The Apple III was designed to take on the business environment, released on May 19, 1980. The Apple III was a relatively conservative design for computers of the era. However, Steve Jobs did not want it to have a fan; instead, he wanted the heat generated by the electronics to be dissipated through the chassis of the machine, forgoing the cooling fan. However, the physical design of the case was not sufficient to cool the components inside it. By removing the fan from the design, the Apple III was prone to overheating. This caused the integrated circuit chips to disconnect
from the motherboard. Customers who contacted Apple customer service were told to "raise the computers six inches in the air, and then let go", which would cause the ICs to fall back into place. Thousands of Apple III computers were recalled. A new model was introduced in 1983 to try and rectify the problems, but the damage was already done.
By August 1981 Apple was among the three largest microcomputer companies. IBM entered the personal computer market that month with the IBM PC, but Apple had many advantages. While IBM began with one microcomputer, little available hardware or software, and a couple of hundred dealers, Apple had five times as many dealers in the US and an established international distribution network. After examining the IBM PC and finding it unimpressive, Apple confidently purchased a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal with the headline "Welcome, IBM. Seriously". Microsoft head Bill Gates was at Apple headquarters the day of IBM's announcement and later detailed about How Apple didn’t seem to care and it took them a year to realize what was happening. By 1983 the PC surpassed the Apple II as the best-selling personal computer.
Apple's board told Jobs he needed adult supervision but he could sign off on whoever they hired. Jobs and the board went through about 20 candidates, most in the tech sector, but Jobs vetoed them all. Finally, he met John Sculley, who had risen to CEO of Pepsi in just 10 years. He also had a reputation for being a marketing master, having helped create the "Pepsi Challenge" campaign that sparked the so-called cola wars of the 1970s. 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?" Apple Computer's business division was focused on the Apple III, another iteration of the text-based computer. Simultaneously the Lisa group worked on a new machine that would feature
a completely different interface and introduce the words mouse, icon, and desktop into the vocabulary of the computing public. In return for the right to buy US$1,000,000 of pre-IPO stock, Xerox granted Apple Computer three days access to the PARC facilities. PARC was a sub research and development company. After visiting PARC, they came away with new ideas that would complete the foundation for Apple’s first Graphical User Interface computer.
By 1984, Apple had proved twice over that it was a force to be reckoned with. It had taken on IBM, the biggest name in business computing, and acquitted itself admirably. The Apple I and II were resounding successes, but while the Apple III and Lisa had been remarkable failures, Apple needed another hit. Both to guarantee its future and to target the lower end of the market, which to date it had regularly ignored. That hit, was the Macintosh: the machine that largely guaranteed the company's future. We'll always remember Steve Jobs as the man who
launched the Macintosh, but he only arrived on the project in 1981 - two years after Jef Raskin had started work on the low-cost computer for home and business use. Jobs quickly stamped his mark on it, and Raskin left in 1982 - before the product shipped. We must give Raskin credit for original idea and its name (his favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh, but otherwise the machine that eventually launched was a fair way away from the one he’d originally envisaged.
Raskin's early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple, that really pushed the team to implement the GUI for which it became famous. They saw the potential of the GUI’s desktop metaphorical based design, and they'd already laid much of the groundwork for Apple's own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which,
in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple. If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it's unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did - and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all. In early 1984, at Apple's annual shareholders meeting, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience. Nobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive and friendly. It brought the GUI
to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform. Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us. You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble – a big one – that any other company would likely have shied away from. But then no other company was ran by Steve Jobs.
Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special. And he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the show-stopping machine needed a show-stopping ad. He put in a call to Apple’s agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl 18. The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM. They dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful expression working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking
their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception. So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones around about her. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen. But Major hurled a hammer through
the screen to destroy the evil talking head. Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs and CEO John Sculley agreed to add the memorable line, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Two days after the 1984 ad aired, the Macintosh went on sale. It came bundled with two applications designed to show off its interface: MacWrite and MacPaint.
Although the Mac garnered an immediate, enthusiastic following, it was too radical for some, who labelled it a mere "toy". Because the machine was entirely designed around the GUI, existing text-mode and command-driven applications had to be redesigned and the programming code rewritten; this was a challenging undertaking that many software developers shied away from, and resulted in an initial lack of software for the new system. It had all been good news so far for Apple. The company was still young, but going from strength to strength, and it offered some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Sculley and Jobs management styles were wildly different, though,
and it's perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn't like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh. From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over years of development – as
the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled. Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn't enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh hit the shelves at $2,495. That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn't helped by a downturn in the company's fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh
started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn't hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign Jobs in. That's exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 - just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team. Talking to the BBC in 2012, Sculley said “what went on inside the company at the time: When the Macintosh Office was introduced in 1985 and failed, Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn't afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings - not just to cover the Mac's problems. That's what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually
the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support.” Sculley and Jobs's respective visions for the company greatly differed. Sculley favoured open architecture computers like the Apple II, sold to 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. 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. Although its products provided 85 percent 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. The Macintosh's failure to defeat the PC strengthened Sculley's position in the company. But Jobs wasn't ready to go without a fight. Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrestle back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team,
which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip. The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. They sided with Sculley, and Jobs' fate was sealed. Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple's chairman. That might sound like a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.
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. Jobs later explained that the industry went in to a recession and Sculley did not know what to do. He said there was a leadership vacuum at the top of Apple, there were strong general managers running divisions at Apple but there was a lack of leadership. Jobs described John Sculley as having an incredible survival instinct so that when the going got tough he blamed all of Apple’s problems on Jobs. Mentioning that you don’t become one of the top CEO’s
in corporate America without learning how to survive. Steve Jobs said he hired the wrong guy. Following his resignation from Apple in 1985, Jobs founded NeXT Inc. 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. The NeXT computer was shown to the world in what was considered Jobs's comeback event, a lavish invitation only gala launch event that was described as a multimedia extravaganza. In 1986, Jobs funded the spinout of The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucas film'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. Jobs did what the best managers often do: He got out of the way. It was said that Jobs "saw the potential of what Pixar could be before
the rest of us," and had only one request of the animated films: "make it great." Some believe, that without Steve Jobs, Pixar would not have survived long enough to make Toy Story or any of the films that followed. And when others urged Pixar to pick up the pace and churn out more CGI films per year, Jobs let Lasseter and Co. maintain a relative snail's pace — at least
for a film company, ensuring a slow-but-steady stream of high-quality and award-winning movies. The first film produced by Pixar with its Disney partnership, Toy Story (1995), with Jobs credited as executive producer, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released. Jobs took Pixar public in 1996, and by the end of the first day of trading, his 80 percent share of the company was worth $1 billion. After nearly 10 years of struggling, Jobs had finally hit it big. But the best was yet to come.
Chrisann Brennan notes that after Jobs was forced out of Apple, "he apologized many times over for his behaviour" towards her and Lisa. She also states that Jobs "said that he never took responsibility when he should have, and that he was sorry. By this time, Jobs had developed a strong relationship with Lisa and when she was nine, Jobs had her name on her birth certificate changed from "Lisa Brennan" to "Lisa Brennan-Jobs." In addition, Jobs and Brennan developed a working relationship to co-parent Lisa, a change Brennan credits to the influence of his newly found biological sister, Mona Simpson (who worked to repair the relationship between Lisa and Jobs). Jobs found Mona after first finding his birth mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson, shortly after he left Apple. But Jobs didn’t contact his birth family during his adoptive mother Clara's lifetime.
He would later tell his official biographer "I never wanted Paul and Clara to feel like I didn't consider them my parents, because they were totally my parents. I loved them so much that I never wanted them to know of my search, and I even had reporters keep it quiet when any of them found out." However, in 1986 when he was 31, Clara was diagnosed with lung cancer. He began to spend a great deal of time with her and learned more details about her background and his adoption, information that motivated him to find his biological mother. Jobs found on his birth certificate the name of the San Francisco doctor to whom Schieble had turned when she was pregnant. Jobs only contacted Schieble after Clara died and after he received permission from his father, Paul. Jobs stated that he was motivated to find his birth mother out of both curiosity and a need to see if she was okay and to thank her, because he was glad he didn't end up as an abortion. She
was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have him. Schieble was emotional during their first meeting (though she wasn't familiar with the history of Apple or Jobs's role in it) and told him that she had been pressured into signing the adoption papers. She said that she regretted giving him up and repeatedly apologized to him for it. Jobs and Schieble would develop a friendly relationship throughout the rest of his life and would spend Christmas together. During this first visit, Schieble told Jobs that he had a sister, Mona, who was not aware that she had a brother. Schieble then arranged for them to meet in New York where Mona worked. Her first
impression of Jobs was that he was straightforward and lovely, just a normal and sweet guy. Simpson and Jobs then went for a long walk to get to know each other. Jobs later told his biographer that Mona was not completely thrilled at first to have me in her life and have her mother so emotionally affectionate toward me but as we got to know each other, we became really good friends, and she is my family. I don't know what I'd do without her. I can't imagine a better sister.
In 1989, Jobs first met his future wife, Laurene Powell, when he gave a lecture at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a student. Soon after the event, he stated that Laurene "was right there in the front row in the lecture hall, and I couldn't take my eyes off of her ... kept losing my train of thought, and started feeling a little giddy." After the lecture, Jobs met up with her in the parking lot and invited her out to dinner. From that point forward, they were together, with a few minor exceptions, for the rest of his life. Jobs proposed on New Year's Day 1990 with
a handful of freshly picked wildflowers. They married on March 18, 1991, in a Buddhist ceremony at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. Fifty people, including his father, Paul, and his sister, Mona, attended. The ceremony was conducted by Jobs's guru, Kobun Chino Otogawa. Jobs's and Powell's first child, Reed, was born September 1991. Jobs's father, Paul,
died a year and a half later, on March 5, 1993. Jobs and Powell had two more children, Erin, born in August 1995, and Eve, born in 1998. The family lived in Palo Alto, California. NeXT workstations were first released in 1990 and priced at $9,999. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced and designed for the education sector, but was largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive for educational institutions. The NeXT workstation was known for its technical strengths, chief among them was 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. NeXT went after the education market, which had
been Apple’s territory. However, it did it with even more expensive hardware than Apple’s. Outside of the LC line, Apple’s systems were pricey in the early 1990s. NeXT attempted to make up for this by aiming its sales teams at higher education, selling not mere computers, but “workstations.”
After the 1990 hardware didn’t sell well NeXT stopped manufacturing computers in 1993 to become a software-only vendor, selling NeXTSTEP as a combination operating system and object-oriented development environment. NeXTstep for Intel became a popular product among large companies and especially financial institutions for rapidly developing and deploying custom software. Meanwhile at Apple, the future isn’t looking so bright. Despite initially being quite successful
in chasing high profits with wide margins, its market is starting to shrink and, with it, so did its retained income. For the first time in the company’s history, its year-end results showed its cash balances to be rising more slowly than they had the year before. That wasn't its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this
would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 - a direct competitor to the all-graphical Macintosh System Software. Apple Computer bought NeXT in 1996 after its own efforts to upgrade the Macintosh operating system failed. After the sale, Steve Jobs first began working as an advisor but was later appointed acting-CEO, and then finally CEO of the company. Apple said that NeXT’s “strengths in development software and operating environments” would be combined with Apple’s “ease-of-use” and multimedia software. Apple initially said that NeXTSTEP features would be used in its own operating system, Mac OS. Soon after Apple closed the deal,
however, NeXTSTEP became the foundation on which all future Apple operating systems, including today’s macOS, could be traced. Arguably Apple saved Next from being a failure however much of its software helped build the next generation of Apple. NeXT failed to achieve its objectives and burned a ton of cash in the process. But the hardware and software wasn’t without technical qualities. Some writers, like Randall Stross in Steve
Jobs and The NeXT Big Thing, would pin the business failure mostly on Jobs, and his personality, who famously micromanaged everything, insisted on bizarrely difficult and expensive positions, alienated important partners, and pivoted wildly as they ran out of money and investors. However this failure taught him so much that he was finally able to be a great CEO when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s. Steve Wozniak explained in a 2013 interview that while Jobs was at NeXT he was really getting his head together. In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for $427 million. The deal was
finalized in February 1997, bringing Jobs back to the company he had cofounded. Jobs terminated a number of projects, such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company." Jobs also changed the licensing
program for Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making machines. When Jobs returned, the company wasn't in a very good condition. Apple had begun to flounder as cheap PCs running Windows flooded the market. Jobs found himself in the driver's seat again and
took some drastic steps to turn the company around. Jobs summoned Apple’s top employees to the auditorium, and, wearing shorts and sneakers, got up on stage and asked everyone to tell him, quote, “what’s wrong with this place.” After some murmurings and uncertain responses, Jobs cut everyone off. “It’s the products! So what’s wrong with the products? The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!” And that’s because while Jobs was away Apple started to lose their iconic identity which was a trademark of Steve Jobs influence. Prices went up and Macs suddenly stopped selling. The product line proliferated
and became so fragmented that it was impossible to tell the difference between models. This not only confused customers, but also sales associates, and Apple’s image was damaged in the process. Jobs started making steps to put back in place the Apple he had originally built. This started at the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment to release Office for Macintosh as well
as a $150 million investment. As well as Apple and Microsoft agreed to settle a long-standing dispute over whether Microsoft's Windows operating system infringed on any of Apple's patents. Jobs used the money to ramp up advertising and highlight the products Apple already offered, while choking off R&D money in non-producing areas. One of Jobs's first moves as new acting CEO was to develop the iMac, which bought Apple time to restructure. The original iMac integrated a CRT display and CPU into a streamlined, translucent plastic body. The line became a sales smash, moving about one million units each year. It also helped re-introduce Apple to the media and public,
and showcased the company's new emphasis on design and aesthetics. Through Jobs's guidance, the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new products. Their appealing designs and powerful marketing worked well for Apple. And at the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the "interim" modifier from his title and became Apple’s permanent CEO. In May 2001, after much speculation, Apple announced the opening of their own retail stores, to be located throughout the major U.S. computer buying markets. The stores were designed for two primary purposes: to stem the tide of Apple's declining share of the computer market and to respond to poor marketing of Apple products at third-party retail outlets. Another initial selling point was the original
incarnation of the Genius Bar, which featured pictures of Albert Einstein and other famous geniuses who had been included in Apple's "Think Different" ads of the time. Jobs positioned the in-store "geniuses" as able to answer customers' questions —and if they couldn't, there was a landline to someone in Cupertino who could. More than 500 fans lined up at the Tysons store starting before dawn that first day. Over the weekend, Tysons and Glendale hosted more than 7500 visitors, and sold a combined $600,000 in products over the first two days. In the years following, the Apple Store has grown to more than 500 locations in over 20 countries.
It has surged in growth despite troubling times for the retail sector, especially in the consumer electronics space. While helping to drive Apple's own growth and playing a key role in the launches of iPod, iPhone, iPad and more, the Apple Store also forever changed the look of computer and electronics retail. And that look has been widely imitated, from Microsoft launching a chain of lookalike stores to Sony attempting the same to actual knockoff Apple Stores in China. However, in order to grow faster, Apple needed something other than the Mac. The company subsequently branched out, introducing and
improving upon other digital devices. Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid-1990s, but Apple found that everyone on the market offered a lackluster user experience. Steve Jobs had a strong term for gadgets like that: “crap”. Everyone at Apple agreed. Flash memory based players of the era held only about 15 songs. Hard drive players held far more but were relatively big, heavy, and they sported difficult-to-navigate user interfaces that did not scale well when scrolling through thousands of songs.
Moreover, most portable media players used the pokey USB 1.1 standard to transfer music from a host computer to the player, which made the user wait up to five minutes to transfer about 15 songs. When moving thousands of songs, the transfer time could shoot up to several hours. Jobs decided that Apple should attempt to create its own MP3 player, one that played well with iTunes and could potentially attract more customers to the Mac platform. 2001 marked an uncertain time for the company. The recent tech stock crash loomed fresh in everyone’s minds, and Apple was just barely breaking even financially. The company’s
main focus was on the Mac computer line, and it had few resources to spare for other projects. Due to this the iPod had to be finished quickly so Apple wouldn’t shut down the project; the product had to justify its existence as a financial drain on the company. Product lead, Tony Fadell also felt that competitors would beat Apple to market with a similar device if Apple didn’t work as fast as it could. After six months of hard work, the iPod began to come together. The concentrated and well-organized efforts of Apple’s various iPod
teams proved that they could finish the product in time, but one hiccup almost got in the way. The events of September 11, 2001, took place during the final stretch of the iPod’s development. As the attacks unfolded, an Apple team carrying key iPod prototypes from Taiwan landed on U.S. soil—just before the U.S. government shut down air travel nationwide. The iPod prototypes made it in time. The first iPod shipped in November 2001.
And to date, Apple has sold more than 304 million units across four different models. With the successful introduction of the iPod, the company entered the mobile device and music distribution industries. Giving and enormous boost to Apple’s revenue. In 2003 Apple launched the iTunes music store with 200,000 songs at 99 cents each, giving people a convenient way to buy music legally online. It sold 1 million songs in its first week. Music expert Mark Mulligan described Jobs as single-handedly
pulling the music industry into the digital age. Before Apple launched iTunes, Jobs met with dozens of musicians in the hopes of corralling record labels into going along with the iTunes plan. One of the people Jobs pitched to was prominent trumpet player Wynton Marsalis.
Marsalis said Jobs talked for two hours straight. “He was a man possessed,” he said. “After a while, I started looking at him and not the computer, because I was so fascinated with his passion.” Pitching and selling was a key part of Jobs’ repertoire. He was one of the world’s best presenters. His keynote speeches captivated audiences and have become a staple of the Apple brand. He didn't just announce a new Apple product; he found ways to get the audience as excited as possible while masterfully making that Apple product the next "must have" item. Jobs
passion shown through each and every presentation which resonated with the audience. He was both admired and criticized for his 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. However 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. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very poor; but Jobs stated that he had a rare, much less aggressive type.
Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months, instead relying on alternative medicine to thwart the disease. According to Harvard researcher Ramzi Amri, his choice of alternative treatment "led to an unnecessarily early death". Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. With Kettering Cancer Center Chief Barrie Cassileth, saying, "Jobs' faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide." According to Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, he refused to undergo surgery for his cancer because, quote, “he didn’t want his body being opened.” A decision Jobs later regretted as his health declined.
It was around this time in 2005, a year after he was first diagnosed with cancer, that Jobs made a candid speech to graduating students at Stanford University. This speech is known as one of the best Jobs has ever delivered. He talked about his love for what he does and the importance of “Staying hungry, staying foolish.” He also reflects on the hardest moment of his life, leaving Apple in 1985. He explains that he didn’t see it at the time but it ended up being the best thing that could’ve happened to him. Back at Apple, Jobs began preparing for
the June 6, 2005 Worldwide developers conference, where Apple would reveal their plan to begin producing Intel-based Mac computers in 2006. And when that day arrived, the new MacBook Pro and iMac became the first Apple computers to use Intel's Core Duo processor. By August, Apple had made the transition to Intel chips for the entire Mac product line—one year earlier than expected. And all of these great performances and products
helped to boost Apple's stock price, which increased more than tenfold between early 2003 and 2006, from around $6 per share to over $80. And in January 2006, Apple's market cap surpassed that of Dell, a huge milestone for the company. Because nine years prior, Dell's CEO had said that if he ran Apple he would "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Jobs sent an
email to 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 Meanwhile Pixar's contract with Disney was running out, Jobs and Disney chief executive Michael Eisner tried but failed to negotiate a new partnership, and in early 2004, Jobs announced that Pixar would seek a new partner to distribute its films after its contract with Disney expired. But In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to mend relations with Jobs and Pixar. In 2006, the two 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. In January 2007, Apple entered the smartphone business with the introduction of the iPhone. It included a touch display, all the features of an iPod, and an internet browser. It was a
complete rebuke of the entire smartphone market, which had been fixated on adding more buttons, more features, and more styluses. But all those things came at the detriment of the user experience. That’s why Steve Jobs used this graph while introducing the iPhone. The Moto Q, Nokia E62, and Palm Treo were more capable than the average cellphone, but those extra features added complexity. The iPhone set out to deliver the best of both worlds: The most feature-filled phone ever, while also being the easiest to use. And it all started by eliminating what Steve Jobs
had loathed throughout his entire career: Buttons. The iPhone had a huge multi touch display, with only one button. That way, the interface could change depending on which app was being used. An approach that had worked well on computers for decades. There was also pinch-to-zoom, physics-based effects like inertial scrolling and rubber-banding, and multitasking that allowed users to seamlessly switch from music to phone calls to web browsing to email and back. The first-generation iPhone may be considered primitive by today’s standards, with its 2-megapixel camera, small display, and thick frame. But the original iPhone
single-handedly began the modern smartphone era, with nearly all of today’s devices borrowing it’s design and functionality elements. On June 28, 2007, the iPhone finally went on sale after five months of anticipation. And the excitement resulted in lines forming outside Apple Stores across the country two days before the product’s release. The iPhone was nothing
short of a success, with a quarter of a million units being sold on its first day. Smart phone makers went back to the drawing board to develop multi-touch devices that could compete, and Apple went to work on their next model, the iPhone 3G. In January 2009 Jobs issued a memo informing Apple employees, quote, “that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.” And he took a six-month medical leave of absence, leaving Tim Cook in charge of Apple’s day to day operation, as he did in 2004. At this point, Jobs finally agreed to undergo a liver transplant. And by mere coincidence, Tim Cook happened to be an eligible donor since he shared Job’s O negative blood type. But when Cook offered a portion of his liver, Jobs cut him off. Yelling, “No, I'll never let you do that. I'll never do that." Instead, he was put on a waiting list in Tennessee,
where he had the best chance of receiving a liver transplant as quickly as possible. And that’s exactly what happened in April 2009. Post surgery, Job’s prognosis was described as “excellent.” And he returned to Apple six weeks later on a part-time basis.
The first public appearance Jobs made after his surgery was at an Apple Event in September 2009. When he walked on stage, Jobs was met with a standing ovation that lasted almost a minute long. It was during this event that he unveiled the iPad. A product that was actually conceived before the iPhone, but was shelved due to the smartphone project taking priority. The idea of
a tablet in particular appealed to Job’s, mainly because of its simplicity and portability. There was no keyboard or mouse needed, just a sheet of glass that displayed anything you wanted. In fact, Jobs called the iPad, quote, “the most important thin
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