The Full Biography
Steve Jobs. Inventor. Cupertino. The adopted kid from the Santa Clara Valley who built Apple, was thrown out of it, and came back with a phone that remade the pocket.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a black turtleneck, a pair of jeans, a glass stage, a device held up like a cigarette or a communion wafer. The year might be 1984, when the Macintosh spoke, or 2007, when he took an iPhone out of his pocket and the room understood that the pocket had changed. What the still cannot show is Steven Paul Jobs of San Francisco, given up at birth, raised by a machinist and a bookkeeper in the Valley, a Reed College dropout who sat in on a calligraphy class, and a man who spent his last years designing a company as carefully as a machine.
He was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco. His biological parents were Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, graduate students; the adoption was arranged on the condition that the child go to a college-educated couple. The first couple fell through. Paul and Clara Jobs, of Mountain View and then Los Altos, took him. Paul was a Coast Guard veteran who fixed cars and built cabinets in the garage. Clara kept the books. They told him he was adopted. He grew up knowing it. A sister he would not meet for years, the novelist Mona Simpson, remained on the other side of the file. The first pressure was not a company. It was a garage that treated making things as a moral act, and a boy who decided that taste was a form of truth.
Homestead High School, in Cupertino, put him in the same valley as Hewlett-Packard and the people who were already building the next machines. He phoned Bill Hewlett, got a summer job, and met Steve Wozniak, an engineer five years older who could design a computer the way other people doodle. They built and sold blue boxes that stole telephone tones — a prank that was also an education in systems. Jobs went to Reed College in Portland in 1972, dropped out, and stayed on campus sleeping on floors. He sat in on a calligraphy course. He has said, in the Stanford address that became his most famous public speech, that those serifs and spaces came back when the Macintosh needed a typeface. The sentence is true enough to keep. India, in 1974, with his friend Daniel Kottke, was a search for a teacher and a diet. He came home thinner, shaved, and still the kid who wanted to build.
The door was a garage and a partnership. On April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer. Wayne sold his share back in days. Wozniak built the Apple I and then the Apple II, the machine that put the company into American schools and bedrooms. Jobs was the one who understood that a circuit board was not the product — the box, the story, the store, the feeling of a finished thing was the product. He was twenty-one. He was already difficult in the way a person is difficult when he believes the rest of the room is insufficiently awake.
The Apple II had already paid for the building. Wozniak’s machine, in plastic, with a keyboard a civilian could trust, put the company into bedrooms and school labs; VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, gave a businessman a reason to buy one. Jobs pushed the case and the advertising. He was already the person who said no to a dozen ports. The Macintosh, introduced on January 24, 1984, after a Super Bowl commercial that borrowed George Orwell and Ridley Scott, was the first mass-market computer that asked a person to point and click rather than type a command. It was not a sales triumph on the first day. It was a change in what a civilian thought a computer was allowed to look like. Inside the company the weather was already turning. The Lisa had been expensive and late. The Mac team was a pirate flag on a campus Jobs himself had divided. John Sculley, hired from Pepsi, and a board that had grown tired of the founder’s weather, pushed him out of his own operating role in 1985. He resigned. He was thirty. The exile is the plot, not a footnote.
He founded NeXT, a computer company for higher education that sold beautiful, expensive cubes and, more lastingly, an operating system. He bought, from George Lucas in 1986, a small computer-graphics division for ten million dollars and named it Pixar. For years Pixar was a hardware and software shop that happened to make shorts. Then Toy Story (1995), with Disney, proved that a computer could make a feature the country would love without apology. Jobs became a billionaire on the Pixar stock, not on the first Apple fortune. The man the board had shown the door now owned a studio that could make children cry about a cowboy.
Apple, by 1996, was circling the drain. It bought NeXT for the operating system and, with the system, the founder. In 1997 Jobs returned, first as advisor, then as interim chief, then as chief. The company was ninety days from insolvency in the telling he preferred. He killed most of the product line. He hired back the idea of taste. With Jony Ive he made the iMac (1998) in colors a dentist’s office had never ordered. He launched the Think Different campaign, which used other people’s genius to announce that the company had remembered its own. He built Apple Stores so the machine would not die in a big-box aisle under a clerk who did not care.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.Steve Jobs, Stanford University, 2005
Then the run that remade industries that were not supposed to be his. The iPod, 2001, a thousand songs in a pocket, white earbuds as a civic uniform. The iTunes Store, 2003, a legal song for ninety-nine cents after years of arguing with record companies. The iPhone, January 9, 2007, a phone, a browser, and an iPod that you touched. The App Store, 2008, a new kind of software economy. The iPad, 2010, a slab the industry mocked until it could not. He did not invent the smartphone, the MP3 player, or the tablet. He made the versions a civilian would stand in line for, and he made the line part of the product.
The private file is not as clean as the keynote. He denied, for years, that he was the father of Lisa Brennan, born in 1978 to Chrisann Brennan; a DNA test and a long weather of neglect sat under the Apple origin myth. He reconciled with Lisa in time. In 1991 he married Laurene Powell, whom he had met at Stanford. They had three children: Reed, Erin, Eve. He was a father who could be present and a father who could disappear into a factory’s next bevel. Friends and enemies have written the same man: cruel in a conference room, tender in a hospital, unwilling to ship a thing he thought was ugly.
The turn is 1985, and then 1997. Being thrown out taught him how to build a company that could survive him. Coming back taught the Valley that a founder’s taste, properly weaponized, could be worth more than a dozen competent product maps. He said, at Stanford, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” He meant the calligraphy class and the garage. The country framed it.
Six things most people never knew
- The adoption almost failed the education clause. Paul and Clara were not the college couple on the first form. They promised he would go. He dropped out. He still went.
- The calligraphy class is in the Mac. Reed College. A dropout sitting in. Type as a moral fact.
- Ronald Wayne sold his Apple share in days. The third founder. A receipt that still hurts to read.
- Pixar, not the first Apple stock, made him a billionaire. Ten million to Lucas. Toy Story. A studio from a hardware shop.
- NeXT is why he could return. Apple bought the company for the system and received the founder in the crate.
- The Stanford speech is a man who already knew the diagnosis. 2005. Hungry, foolish, and on a clock.
In 2003 doctors found a neuroendocrine tumor of the pancreas — a rarer, slower form than the sentence “pancreatic cancer” usually means, and still a death. He delayed surgery while he tried other paths. He had the surgery. The disease returned. In 2009 he received a liver transplant in Memphis. He kept appearing on stage when he could, thinner, in the same turtleneck, holding the next slab. He did not make the illness a brand. He also did not hide the weight loss well enough for the stock to ignore it.
The later years
The last years were a dual project: finish the products, and finish the company so it would not need him in the room. He promoted Tim Cook, the operations man he had hired from Compaq, as the person who could run the factory of factories. He pushed the iPhone into a second and third version that made the first one look like a prototype, which it was. He argued about glass and aluminum the way a cabinetmaker argues about a joint. He sat in on Pixar’s stories until Disney bought the studio in 2006; he became Disney’s largest individual shareholder and a board member, the exile who now sat on the most American entertainment company of them all.
Home was Palo Alto — a house that was nicer than the garage and less palatial than the fortune. Laurene kept the family. The children grew up inside a name that had become a verb. He walked the neighborhood. He listened to music with the seriousness of a man who had rebuilt the record business and still thought Bob Dylan was the test. Colleagues from the return years describe a man who could destroy a slide in a morning and then, in the afternoon, hold a prototype as if it were a bird.
The 2005 Stanford commencement is the public will. He told the calligraphy story, the firing story, and the cancer story to a field of students who would, within a few years, carry his phone as an ordinary object. He said stay hungry, stay foolish. He said death is very likely the single best invention of life. He did not then know how short the remaining calendar was. He knew it was not infinite.
He resigned as chief executive on August 24, 2011. He became chairman. Cook took the job. The letter was short. The company was no longer ninety days from insolvency. It was on its way to becoming one of the most valuable firms on earth, a fact that would finish arriving after he was gone. He had already, by then, walked the Infinite Loop campus as a man saying goodbye without using the word. He had pushed the iPhone 4S and Siri toward a stage he would not take. He had argued about the yacht, the plane, the next glass, the next store on a corner he would not see opened. Colleagues from those last months describe a man who could still kill a bad idea in a morning and then go home to Palo Alto to sit in a garden. The garden, at the end, was the garage’s last form.
He died at home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011. He was fifty-six. Laurene was there. The children were there. The cause was the pancreatic disease and the long fight that had followed the transplant. Apple put a statement on its home page and left it there. Flags, in Cupertino and in other people’s hands, did what flags do. The products did not stop. That had been the point of the last design.
The memorials wanted a saint of innovation. The better ones remembered the garage, the exile, Lisa, the conference-room cruelty, the calligraphy, and a man who believed that what a thing looks like and how it works are the same subject. Mona Simpson’s eulogy, published in the newspapers, gave him back to a family that was not a keynote.
After he was gone
Apple kept the glass stages and the January rooms. Cook’s company became larger than Jobs’s company had ever been, which is a kind of success and a kind of argument. Pixar remained a Disney engine. Laurene Powell Jobs built philanthropic work that does not need a turtleneck. Lisa wrote a memoir. The children have mostly declined to become products. The iPhone is now a utility, like a key, which is the last thing a man who hated ugliness would have sneered at and the first thing he would have recognized as victory.
He came out of an adoption that almost failed, learned making in a garage, built Apple, lost Apple, made NeXT and Pixar, came back, put a thousand songs and then a computer in a pocket, and died in Palo Alto at fifty-six. If you only remember the turtleneck, you have the still. If you remember the calligraphy class, the 1985 door, and the phone on January 9, you have him.
Portrait: Matthew Yohe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons