Steve Jobs, in full Steven Paul Jobs, (born February 24, 1955, San Francisco, California, U.S.

—died
October 5, 2011, Palo Alto, California), cofounder of Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), and
a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era.
Founding of Apple

Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California, located in what is now known as Silicon
Valley. Though he was interested in engineering, his passions of youth varied. He dropped out of Reed
College, in Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974, and
saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism.

Apple I
Back in Silicon Valley in the autumn of 1974, Jobs reconnected with Stephen Wozniak, a former high
school friend who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company. When Wozniak told Jobs of his
progress in designing his own computer logic board, Jobs suggested that they go into business together,
which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak’s design in 1976. The Apple I, as
they called the logic board, was built in the Jobses’ family garage with money they obtained by selling
Jobs’s Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s programmable calculator.

Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to a broad
audience, at least if it did not appear to belong in a junior high school science fair. With Jobs’s
encouragement, Wozniak designed an improved model, the Apple II, complete with a keyboard, and they
arranged to have a sleek, molded plastic case manufactured to enclose the unit.

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Steve Jobs
During that same period, Jobs was heading the most important project in the company’s history. In 1979
he led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology demonstration at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC) to see how the graphical user interface could make computers easier to use
and more efficient. Soon afterward, Jobs left the engineering team that was designing Lisa, a business
computer, to head a smaller group building a lower-cost computer. Both computers were redesigned to
exploit and refine the PARC ideas, but Jobs was explicit in favouring the Macintosh, or Mac, as the new
computer became known. Jobs coddled his engineers and referred to them as artists, but his style was
uncompromising; at one point he demanded a redesign of an internal circuit board simply because he
considered it unattractive. He would later be renowned for his insistence that the Macintosh be not merely
great but “insanely great.” In January 1984 Jobs himself introduced the Macintosh in a brilliantly
choreographed demonstration that was the centrepiece of an extraordinary publicity campaign. It would
later be pointed to as the archetype of “event marketing.”

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However, the first Macs were underpowered and expensive, and they had few software applications—all
of which resulted in disappointing sales. Apple steadily improved the machine, so that it eventually
became the company’s lifeblood as well as the model for all subsequent computer interfaces. But Jobs’s
apparent failure to correct the problem quickly led to tensions in the company, and in 1985 Sculley
convinced Apple’s board of directors to remove the company’s famous cofounder.
NeXT and Pixar

Jobs quickly started another firm, NeXT Inc., designing powerful workstation computers for the
education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc., a
Japanese electronics company. Although the NeXT computer was notable for its engineering design, it
was eclipsed by less costly computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Inc. In the early
1990s Jobs focused the company on its innovative software system, NEXTSTEP.

Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs acquired a controlling interest in Pixar, a computer graphics firm that had been
founded as a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company of Hollywood movie director George
Lucas. Over the following decade Jobs built Pixar into a major animation studio that, among other
achievements, produced the first full-length feature film to be completely computer-animated, Toy Story,
in 1995. Pixar’s public stock offering that year made Jobs, for the first time, a billionaire. He eventually
sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.
Saving Apple

Steve Jobs with an iMac

In late 1996 Apple, saddled by huge financial losses and on the verge of collapse, hired a new chief
executive, semiconductor executive Gilbert Amelio. When Amelio learned that the company, following
intense and prolonged research efforts, had failed to develop an acceptable replacement for the
Macintosh’s aging operating system (OS), he chose NEXTSTEP, buying Jobs’s company for more than
$400 million—and bringing Jobs back to Apple as a consultant. However, Apple’s board of directors
soon became disenchanted with Amelio’s inability to turn the company’s finances around and in June
1997 requested Apple’s prodigal cofounder to lead the company once again. Jobs quickly forged an
alliance with Apple’s erstwhile foe, the Microsoft Corporation, scrapped Amelio’s Mac-clone
agreements, and simplified the company’s product line. He also engineered an award-winning advertising
campaign that urged potential customers to “think different” and buy Macintoshes. Just as important is
what he did not do: he resisted the temptation to make machines that ran Microsoft’s Windows OS; nor
did he, as some urged, spin off Apple as a software-only company. Jobs believed that Apple, as the only
major personal computer maker with its own operating system, was in a unique position to innovate.

Innovate he did. In 1998, Jobs introduced the iMac, an egg-shaped, one-piece computer that offered high-
speed processing at a relatively modest price and initiated a trend of high-fashion computers. (Subsequent
models sported five different bright colours.) By the end of the year, the iMac was the nation’s highest-
selling personal computer, and Jobs was able to announce consistent profits for the once-moribund
company. The following year, he triumphed once more with the stylish iBook, a laptop computer built
with students in mind, and the G4, a desktop computer sufficiently powerful that (so Apple boasted) it
could not be exported under certain circumstances because it qualified as a supercomputer. Though Apple
did not regain the industry dominance it once had, Steve Jobs had saved his company, and in the process
reestablished himself as a master high-technology marketer and visionary.
Reinventing Apple
Steve Jobs
In 2001 Jobs started reinventing Apple for the 21st century. That was the year that Apple
introduced iTunes, a computer program for playing music and for converting music to the
compact MP3 digital format commonly used in computers and other digital devices. Later the same year,
Apple began selling the iPod, a portable MP3 player, which quickly became the market leader. In 2003
Apple began selling downloadable copies of major record company songs in MP3 format over
the Internet. By 2006 more than one billion songs and videos had been sold through Apple’s online
iTunes Store. In recognition of the growing shift in the company’s business, Jobs officially changed the
name of the company to Apple Inc. on January 9, 2007.

In 2007 Jobs took the company into the telecommunications business with the introduction of the touch-
screen iPhone, a mobile telephone with capabilities for playing MP3s and videos and for accessing the
Internet. Later that year, Apple introduced the iPod Touch, a portable MP3 and gaming device that
included built-in Wi-Fi and an iPhone-like touch screen. Bolstered by the use of the iTunes Store to sell
Apple and third-party software, the iPhone and iPod Touch soon boasted more games than any other
portable gaming system. Jobs announced in 2008 that future releases of the iPhone and iPod Touch would
offer improved game functionality. In an ironic development, Apple, which had not supported game
developers in its early years out of fear of its computers not being taken seriously as business machines,
was now staking a claim to a greater role in the gaming business to go along with its move into
telecommunications.
Health issues

Steve Jobs with an iPad

In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He put off surgery for about nine
months while he tried alternative medicine approaches. In 2004 he underwent a major reconstructive
surgery known as the Whipple operation. During the procedure, part of the pancreas, a portion of the bile
duct, the gallbladder, and the duodenum were removed, after which what was left of the pancreas, the bile
duct, and the intestine were reconnected to direct the gastrointestinal secretions back into the stomach.
Following a short recovery, Jobs returned to running Apple.

Throughout 2008 Jobs lost significant weight, which produced considerable speculation that
his cancer was back. (The average survival rate for patients who underwent Whipple operations was only
20 percent at five years.) Perhaps more than those of any other large corporation, Apple’s stock
market shares were tied to the health of its CEO, which led to demands by investors for full disclosure of
his health—especially as the first reasons given for his weight loss seemed insufficient to explain his
sickly appearance. On January 9, 2009, Jobs released a statement that he was suffering from a hormonal
imbalance for which he was being treated and that he would continue his corporate duties. Less than a
week later, however, he announced that he was taking an immediate leave of absence through the end of
June in order to recover his health. Having removed himself, at least temporarily, from the corporate
structure, Jobs resumed his previous stance that his health was a private matter and refused to disclose
any more details.

In June 2009 the Wall Street Journal reported that Jobs had received a liver transplant the previous April.
Not disclosed was whether the pancreatic cancer he had been treated for previously had spread to his
liver. The operation was performed in Tennessee, where the average waiting period for a liver transplant
was 48 days, as opposed to the national average of 306 days. Jobs came back to work on June 29, 2009,
fulfilling his pledge to return before the end of June. In January 2011, however, Jobs took another
medical leave of absence. In August he resigned as CEO but became chairman. He died two months later.

In 2022 Jobs was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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