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 thing I’ve ever done.” Probably due to its potential to replace traditional computers
and usher in what’s been called the post-PC era. Rumors of an Apple tablet circulated for
many months before iPad was unveiled. And people speculated what its operating
system might look like. After all, the Mac, iPod, and iPhone all featured their own operating
systems optimized for the display and processing power of each product. So why would the iPad be
any different? The logic made sense. But Jobs saw things differently. In his view, the iPad should
run the same operating system as the iPhone, while featuring tablet-versions of apps
that take advantage of its larger display. So when the iPad was finally introduced on January
27th, 2010, many people were disappointed. Posting comments like, “It’s a giant iPhone. Not
revolutionary at all.” “Just an oversized iPod touch. This will not sell well, no need for
this device.” “No chance of running OS X software, biggest disappointment if you ask me and
worthless for someone who owns an iPhone already.” “Here’s your big iPod really, no USB, no
printing, nothing.” These feelings were commonly shared in the tech community, and
it had a negative effect on Jobs. He said, “I kind of got depressed today.
It knocks you back a bit.” But luckily for Apple, people outside the tech
world were loving iPad. It received high praise from well-known reviewers like David Pogue
and Walt Mossberg, and most importantly, customers were buying it like crazy. One
million units were sold in its first 28 days. Which is pretty astonishing considering that took
the iPhone 74 days to achieve. The iPad went on to become the fastest-selling consumer product in
history. Beating out the previous record-holder: The DVD player. Jobs was riding high,
releasing one hit after another at Apple, with no signs of slowing down. But there was one
thing beginning to catch up with him, his health. In early 2011, a year and a half since Jobs
returned to Apple after his liver transplant, he took a third medical leave of absence. His
letter to employees looked the same as it had the previous two times, and Tim Cook again took
over in his stead. The only difference this time, was that Jobs would never return to
Apple. Despite the leave, Jobs still appeared at the iPad 2 launch event on March 2 and
the WWDC on June 6th, when he introduced iCloud. Ever since the early days of Apple, Jobs’ believe
in creating a seamless and unified ecosystem for users. That’s why he refused to license a third
party operating system for the Mac, or even license Apple’s own Macintosh System Software to
third party computer manufactures. Despite the the fact doing so would’ve made Apple more money
and allowed their operating system to achieve a higher marketshare. He recognized that the
more a product was fragmented, the more problems it would cause for customers. Part of Jobs’
efforts to create a seamless user experience, was to provide a cloud-based service that could
keep all of a user’s data in sync across all their devices. Initially that service was called
MobileMe, which cost $99 a year. But the execution was flawed and resulted in a product that just
didn’t work. Jobs fired the person in charge, and Apple made a second attempt with iCloud,
which supplied users with 5GB of space for free. It was introduced in 2011. And Jobs said,
“We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. We’re going to move
your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” This time, their cloud-based
service actually worked. And it resulted in a fairly magical experience for users. Photos
shot on their iPhone would automatically appear on their Mac and iPad, while emails and calendar
events synced seamlessly across all their devices. It was an incredible service that’s more important
to Apple’s ecosystem today than ever before. But despite Apple’s successes, Jobs’ health only
continued to fail. His situation became so dire, that he was forced to resign as Apple's CEO. In
August 2011, Jobs wrote a letter to the board, saying, "I have always said if there ever came
a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the
first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come." Jobs became chairman of Apple’s
board and named Tim Cook as his successor as CEO. As chairman, Jobs continued to work for Apple
until the day before his death six weeks later. He passed away at his Palo Alto
home around 3 p.m. on October 5, due to complications from a pancreatic tumor
that resulted in respiratory arrest. His wife, children, and sisters were at his side. Mona
Simpson described his death, saying "Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables,
repeated three times. Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long
time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past
them. Steve's final words were: 'Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.'" He then lost consciousness and died
several hours later. A small private funeral was held on October 7, the details of which, out
of respect for Jobs's family, were not revealed. For two weeks following his death, Apple displayed
a photo of Jobs on their homepage in remembrance. On October 19, a private memorial service was held
on Apple’s campus. Jobs's widow, Laurene, was in attendance, as well as Cook, Bill Campbell, Norah
Jones, Al Gore, and Coldplay. Some of Apple's retail stores closed briefly so employees could
attend the memorial. A video of the service was made availably publicly on Apple’s website.
Jobs was one of the most innovative and influential entrepreneurs of our time. He left a
legacy that will be marveled over and studied for decades. Despite his humble beginnings, Jobs was
able to build the most valuable brand in the world and revolutionize several industries. His identity
was so intertwined with Apple’s, that when he resigned, many predicted the company’s decline.
Claiming they’d no longer be able to innovate without their visionary leader. But many people
failed to recognize the most crucial gift Jobs left behind. His philosophy. When he was forced
out of the company in 1985, John Sculley didn’t share Jobs beliefs about what made a product
great. But when Jobs resigned in 2011, the company had been steeped in that philosophy. And Tim Cook
was perhaps the individual who understood it best. In fact, shortly before his death, Jobs told Cook,
“Never ask what I would do. Just do what's right.” Since Tim Cook took over the company in 2011,
Apple’s value has grown exponentially. Fueled by hit products like the Apple Watch and AirPods.
Even though Jobs hasn’t been with the company for a decade, his philosophy lives within Apple today,
and will continue to exist long into the future.
