Steve Jobs

Based on Wikipedia: Steve Jobs

In 1971, a teenager named Steve Wozniak showed his friend Steve Jobs a small electronic device he'd built. It was a "blue box"—a gadget that could hijack telephone networks and let you make free long-distance calls anywhere in the world. Wozniak had built it for the pure joy of engineering. Jobs saw something else entirely: a product they could sell.

That moment captures everything you need to know about Steve Jobs. He wasn't the engineer. He wasn't the inventor. He was the person who looked at an invention and understood what it could become—and more importantly, who would pay for it.

The blue boxes sold well. And Jobs later said that without them, "there wouldn't have been an Apple." Not because of the money they made, but because of what the experience taught two kids in their early twenties: they could take on large companies and beat them.

The Dropout Who Changed Everything

Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 to a Syrian father and a Swiss-German American mother who weren't married. His biological mother, Joanne Schieble, arranged for a closed adoption before he was born. She had one requirement: her son must be adopted by college graduates.

The first couple selected—a lawyer and his wife—backed out when they discovered the baby was a boy. So Jobs was adopted instead by Paul and Clara Jobs, a mechanic and a bookkeeper. Neither had graduated from college.

Joanne initially refused to sign the adoption papers. She took the case to court, trying to have the baby removed from the Jobs household. She only relented when Paul and Clara made a promise: they would pay for their son's college education.

It's a promise they kept—though not in the way anyone expected.

Paul Jobs was a tinkerer. He built a workbench in his garage for young Steve, hoping to pass along his love of mechanics. "He knew how to build anything," Jobs later said. "If we needed a cabinet, he would build it." But Steve wasn't interested in fixing cars. He wanted to hang out with his dad, sure, but his attention drifted elsewhere—toward electronics, and eventually, toward a different kind of building entirely.

The Troublemaker

Jobs was a difficult child. He resisted authority, frequently misbehaved, and got suspended multiple times. At Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View, California, he became a "socially awkward loner" who was bullied by other students. In the middle of seventh grade, he gave his parents an ultimatum: either take him out of that school, or he would drop out entirely.

His parents weren't wealthy. But they spent their entire savings to buy a new house—a three-bedroom home on Crist Drive in Los Altos—just so Steve could attend schools in the better Cupertino School District.

That house would later be declared a historic site. It was where Apple Computer was born.

At Homestead High School, Jobs met Bill Fernandez, who introduced him to Steve Wozniak. Jobs enrolled in an electronics class but quickly clashed with the teacher. He'd grown his hair long and embraced the counterculture of the early 1970s. The rebellious teenager eventually lost interest in formal electronics education.

But something shifted during his junior year. "I started to listen to music a whole lot," he later told his biographer, "and I started to read more outside of just science and technology—Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear."

By senior year, Jobs had developed two consuming interests: electronics and literature. His best friends reflected this split perfectly—Wozniak the engineering genius, and Chrisann Brennan, an artistic junior who became his first girlfriend.

A classmate described him as "kind of brain and kind of 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 an individual in a world where individuality was suspect.

Reed College and the Calligraphy Class

Jobs insisted on applying to only one college: Reed, a small liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. It was expensive—far more than his working-class parents could afford. But he refused to consider anywhere else.

He lasted one semester.

Jobs dropped out without telling his parents. The education felt meaningless, he said, and he didn't want to drain their savings for something he couldn't see the point of. But he didn't leave campus. Instead, he slept on the floors of friends' dorm rooms, returned Coca-Cola bottles for food money, and walked seven miles every Sunday to get a free meal at the local Hare Krishna temple.

Without the burden of required courses, he started auditing classes that actually interested him. One was a course on calligraphy taught by Robert Palladino.

Reed College had one of the best calligraphy programs in the country. Jobs learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about the varying amounts of space between different letter combinations, about what makes typography beautiful. None of it seemed remotely practical.

"If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college," Jobs said in a famous 2005 speech at Stanford, "the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

The personal computer revolution was about to begin, and it would be defined not by engineers alone, but by someone who understood that beauty mattered—that the way letters sat on a screen could make people feel something.

India, LSD, and Zen

In 1974, Jobs traveled to India with his friend Daniel Kottke, searching for spiritual enlightenment. They were looking for a famous guru named Neem Karoli Baba, but when they arrived at his ashram, it was nearly deserted. The guru had died the previous year.

They spent months wandering India anyway, trekking up dry riverbeds to remote ashrams. Jobs returned to America with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. He had been profoundly changed.

He also experimented heavily with psychedelics. LSD, he later said, was "one of the two or three most important things I had done in my life." By his senior year of high school, he'd already had what he called "the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point" while tripping in a wheat field outside Sunnyvale.

Jobs became a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, studying under the Japanese Zen master Kōbun Chino Otogawa. He spent time at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the United States. He seriously considered becoming a monk in Japan.

He didn't become a monk. But Zen stayed with him—the emphasis on simplicity, on eliminating the unnecessary, on achieving clarity through reduction. Years later, when Apple's products became famous for their minimalist design, the influence was unmistakable.

The Wozniak Partnership

While Jobs was searching for meaning in ashrams and acid trips, Steve Wozniak was doing what he loved: building things.

Wozniak was an engineering prodigy. At Hewlett-Packard, where he worked during the day, he drew circuit designs in his spare time. He built computers not because he wanted to sell them, but because building computers was the most fun thing he could imagine doing.

Jobs recognized something Wozniak didn't: other people would pay money for what Wozniak built for fun.

In 1976, they founded Apple Computer in the Jobs family garage. Jobs was twenty-one. The first product was the Apple I, essentially a circuit board that hobbyists could buy and assemble themselves. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak sold his HP calculator to raise the $1,350 they needed to get started.

The Apple I was a modest success. The Apple II, released a year later, was a phenomenon.

The Apple II was one of the first mass-produced microcomputers—a machine that regular people, not just hobbyists, could actually use. It had color graphics and an integrated keyboard. It looked like something you could put in your home without your spouse threatening divorce.

Jobs and Wozniak became wealthy and famous. They were the faces of a revolution.

Seeing the Future at Xerox

In 1979, Jobs visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, known as PARC. What he saw there changed the direction of his life.

Xerox had invented the future and didn't know what to do with it. Their Alto computer had a graphical user interface—a GUI, pronounced "gooey"—which meant that instead of typing cryptic commands, users could point at pictures on the screen and click a mouse. The screen had windows and icons and menus. It looked like what computers would eventually become.

But Xerox was a copier company. They didn't understand what they had.

Jobs understood immediately. "Why isn't Xerox marketing this?" he demanded. "You could blow everybody away!"

He returned to Apple obsessed with building a computer that worked like what he'd seen at Xerox—but better, more refined, more beautiful. The first attempt was the Lisa, released in 1983. It was a technical achievement but a commercial disaster, priced at nearly $10,000.

The second attempt was the Macintosh.

The Macintosh

The Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first mass-produced personal computer with a graphical user interface. You didn't need to memorize commands. You clicked on little pictures—icons—that represented files and folders and applications. You could see what you were doing.

It was also beautiful. Jobs had obsessed over every detail, including things users would never see. When engineers complained about the time spent designing the internal layout of the circuit board, Jobs told them that real artists care about the parts that nobody looks at.

The calligraphy course at Reed College paid off. The Macintosh had multiple fonts—something no personal computer had offered before. Documents could look professional, even elegant. Combined with a laser printer that Apple released the following year, the LaserWriter, the Macintosh launched an entirely new industry: desktop publishing.

Suddenly, anyone could design a newsletter, a brochure, a magazine. The tools that had required expensive professional equipment were now available on a machine that sat on your desk.

But inside Apple, things were falling apart.

Exile

Jobs was brilliant, but he was also brutal. He divided the world into people who were either geniuses or idiots, with nothing in between. He screamed at employees. He took credit for other people's ideas. He had a "reality distortion field"—a term his colleagues used to describe his ability to convince people that the impossible was possible, often by simply refusing to accept any other answer.

In 1985, after a long power struggle with CEO John Sculley—a man Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi—Jobs was stripped of all operational duties. He resigned from Apple and, on his way out, took several key employees with him.

He was thirty years old. He had been pushed out of the company he founded.

Jobs started a new company called NeXT, which built high-end computers for the education and business markets. The machines were technically impressive—the World Wide Web would later be invented on a NeXT computer—but they were too expensive to sell in large numbers. NeXT struggled.

His other venture was more successful. In 1986, Jobs bought a small computer graphics division from George Lucas's film company, Lucasfilm. He renamed it Pixar.

For years, Pixar lost money. Jobs kept funding it anyway, pouring tens of millions of his own dollars into the company. Then, in 1995, Pixar released the first fully computer-animated feature film in history: Toy Story.

It was a massive hit. Pixar went public, and Jobs's stake was suddenly worth over a billion dollars.

Return to Apple

Meanwhile, Apple was dying. The company had lost direction, churning out a confusing array of products that nobody particularly wanted. Market share was plummeting. By 1997, Apple was weeks away from bankruptcy.

In desperation, Apple's board made a decision that seemed insane to outside observers: they acquired NeXT for $429 million, which meant bringing Steve Jobs back into the company he'd been forced out of twelve years earlier.

Jobs initially returned as an "advisor." Within months, he was running Apple again.

The turnaround was swift and brutal. Jobs killed most of Apple's product lines. He reduced the company's offerings to just four products: two desktop computers and two laptops, one of each for consumers and one for professionals. He wanted focus. He wanted simplicity. He wanted Apple to do a few things extraordinarily well.

And then he started building products that would change the world.

The iMac and the "Think Different" Era

The first new product under Jobs's returned leadership was the iMac, released in 1998. It was a desktop computer housed in a translucent blue-and-white case that looked like nothing else on the market. In an industry dominated by beige boxes, the iMac was a statement: computers could be beautiful.

It was also practical. The iMac was one of the first computers designed specifically for the internet age, with a built-in modem and easy setup. "There's no step three," the ads boasted. You plugged it in and started surfing the web.

Jobs also hired an advertising agency to create a new campaign. The result was "Think Different"—a series of black-and-white images of rebels and visionaries like Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, and Mahatma Gandhi, accompanied by a manifesto: "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers... Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

It was a message to Apple's customers: you are not like everyone else. And it was a message to Apple's employees: we are going to change the world.

The iPod and iTunes

In 2001, Apple released the iPod, a portable music player that could hold "1,000 songs in your pocket." Portable music players existed before the iPod—Sony's Walkman had dominated for decades. But the iPod was different.

It was simple. A single scroll wheel let you navigate through thousands of songs effortlessly. It was beautiful—sleek white plastic with a chrome back. And crucially, it worked seamlessly with iTunes, software that made it easy to organize your music library and transfer songs to the device.

Two years later, Apple launched the iTunes Store, which let you buy individual songs for 99 cents. The music industry had been fighting digital music for years, suing file-sharing services and their users. Jobs convinced the major record labels to try something radical: making it easier to buy music legally than to steal it.

It worked. The iTunes Store sold a million songs in its first week. Within a few years, it became the largest music retailer in the world.

The iPhone

In January 2007, Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and announced that Apple was releasing three new products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.

He paused. Let the audience digest this.

Then he revealed the twist: "These are not three separate devices. This is one device."

The iPhone was not the first smartphone. But it was the first smartphone that worked the way smartphones should work—entirely through a multi-touch screen, with no physical keyboard, designed so that ordinary people could use it without reading a manual.

Jobs had bet the company on it. Apple had spent years developing the technology in secret, at enormous expense. If the iPhone failed, Apple might not survive.

It didn't fail. The iPhone redefined what a phone could be. Within a few years, it had destroyed the existing mobile phone industry. Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola—companies that had dominated the market—were swept away. Apple became the most valuable company in the world.

The Partnership with Jony Ive

Jobs didn't design Apple's products himself. His partner in that work was Jonathan Ive, a British industrial designer who joined Apple in 1992 and eventually became Senior Vice President of Design.

Ive and Jobs shared an obsession with simplicity. They spent hours together, almost daily, walking through Apple's design studio and discussing products in development. They believed that the goal of design was to strip away everything unnecessary until what remained was essential—a principle that Ive later traced to the German designer Dieter Rams, whose work at Braun in the 1960s had anticipated many of Apple's aesthetic choices.

The iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook—all bear the marks of this collaboration. They are products where the technology seems to disappear, leaving only the experience.

Illness and Legacy

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer—a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. Unlike the more common and more deadly form of pancreatic cancer, this type was treatable if caught early.

Jobs initially refused surgery. For nine months, he tried alternative treatments: a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, spiritual consultation. His family and colleagues begged him to have the operation. Finally, in 2004, he agreed.

The delay may have cost him his life. When surgeons operated, they found the cancer had spread. Jobs would spend the rest of his years in declining health, though he continued to run Apple and make product announcements even as his body visibly wasted away.

In 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO. He died on October 5th of that year, at age 56.

Since his death, Jobs has been awarded 141 additional patents—bringing his total to over 450. In 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

The Complicated Man

Jobs was not a simple person to admire. He denied paternity of his first daughter for years. He screamed at employees and made them cry. He parked in handicapped spaces. He was capable of extraordinary cruelty to the people around him.

He was also capable of extraordinary vision. He understood, before almost anyone else, that technology could be beautiful—and that beauty wasn't superficial, but essential. That the way something felt in your hand mattered. That the experience of using a product was as important as what the product could do.

Jobs often said that Apple stood at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. He meant that building great products required not just engineering skill, but taste—an understanding of what humans actually wanted and needed, even when they couldn't articulate it themselves.

"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them," he said.

The computer you're reading this on, the phone in your pocket, the way you buy music and movies, the way you navigate the world—all of it was shaped by a college dropout who dropped acid in wheat fields, studied calligraphy on a whim, meditated at a Zen monastery, and somehow emerged believing he could change the world.

The crazy ones, it turns out, sometimes do.