Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple Inc., is a figure who has left an indelible mark on the history of technology and innovation.
From the creation of the first personal computer to the launch of the iPhone, Jobs led a series of technological revolutions that transformed the way we interact with the digital world. His legacy goes beyond the products he created, and has been the subject of much discussion and debate.
However, the story of Steve Jobs is not only that of a technological visionary, but also that of a complex and controversial man.
His impulsive personality, obsessive perfectionism, and aggressive leadership style made him both admired and criticized. Despite his fame and success, he also experienced failures and personal challenges throughout his life, which made him even more human and real.
In this article, we’ll explore the life, work, and legacy of Steve Jobs, from his beginnings in Silicon Valley to his impact on popular culture. We’ll look at his leadership style and his focus on innovation and design, as well as his impact on the tech industry and the way consumers interact with technology.
We will also discuss his legacy and how it has influenced business culture and the entrepreneurial mindset around the world. Through the story of Steve Jobs, we can learn valuable lessons about the importance of creativity, focus on the user, and perseverance in the pursuit of our dreams.
Steve Jobs Biography
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs’ leadership, the company pioneered a number of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.
Who was Steve Jobs?
Steven Paul Jobs He was an American inventor, designer, and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Apple Computer.
Apple’s revolutionary products, including the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.
Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who put him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different pursuits before co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976.
Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar Animation Studios, and returned to Apple more than a decade later. Jobs died in 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
pixar
In 2011, Forbes estimated that the majority of Steve Jobs’ net worth was between $6.5 and $7 billion from the sale of Pixar to the Walt Disney Company in 2006.
Yet if Jobs hadn’t sold his Apple shares in 1985, when he left the company he founded for more than a decade, his net worth would have been $36 billion.
Movies and books about Steve Jobs
Several films inspired by the life of the computer icon have also been released: Jobs (2013), starring Ashton Kutcher, and Steve Jobs (2015), starring Michael Fassbender and directed by Danny Boyle.
Several books have also been written about Jobs’ life and career, including a 2011 authorized overview biography by Walter Isaacson.
The book was criticized for the portrayal of its main theme by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs.
Karen Blumenthal also wrote a young adult biography in 2012, and Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli wrote Becoming Steve Jobs in 2015.
The death of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs died in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, after battling pancreatic cancer for nearly a decade. He was 56 years old.
In Mona Simpson’s eulogy for Steve Jobs, her sister said that Steve Jobs looked at his sister Patty, children and wife, and then said his last words: «OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.»
Steve Jobs Wife
Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell were married on March 18, 1991. The couple met in the early 1990s at Stanford Business School, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children.
Although he remained a private man who rarely revealed information about his family, Jobs is known to have had a daughter, Lisa, with his girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when he was 23 years old.
He denied paternity to his daughter in court documents, claiming she was sterile. Chrisann struggled financially for much of her life, and Jobs did not enter into a relationship with her daughter until she was seven years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father.
When and where was Steve Jobs born?
Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California.
family and early life
Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah «John» Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students, have given up their unnamed son, Steve Jobs, for adoption.
Jobs’s father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor, and his mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist.
Shortly after Steve was put up for adoption, his birth parents married and had another daughter, Mona Simpson.
It wasn’t until Jobs was 27 that he was able to discover information about his birth parents.
As a child, Jobs was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist.
The family lived in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later be known as Silicon Valley.
As a child, Jobs and his father worked in electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical dexterity in the young Jobs.
Education
Although Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was plagued by frustrations with formal education.
Jobs was a prankster in elementary school out of boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study.
However, the tests for the papers were so good that the administrators wanted to skip him to high school, a proposal his parents rejected.
After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months attending creative classes at school.
Jobs later recounted how a calligraphy course developed his love of typography.
In 1974, Jobs joined Atari as a video game designer.
Several months later he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further afield and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.
Steve Wozniak
When Jobs enrolled at Homestead High School, he was introduced to his future partner and Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.
In a 2007 interview with PC World, Wozniak discussed why he and Jobs clicked so well: «We both loved electronics and the way we wired up digital chips,» Wozniak said.
«Very few people, especially back then, had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do.
He had designed many computers, so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had an independent attitude about things in the world.»
apple computer
In 1976, when Jobs was just 21 years old, he and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer in the Jobs family garage.
They financed their business project with Jobs’s sale of his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak’s sale of his beloved scientific calculator.
Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry with Apple by democratizing technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive, and accessible to everyday consumers.
Wozniak envisioned a series of user-friendly personal computers, and with Jobs in charge of marketing, Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each.
The Apple I earned the corporation about $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple’s second model, the Apple II, the company’s sales increased by 700 percent to $139 million.
The bag
In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion at the end of its first day of trading.
Jobs turned to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over as Apple’s CEO.
However, subsequent Apple products suffered significant design flaws, leading to product recalls and consumer disappointment.
IBM suddenly outsold Apple, and Apple had to compete with a business world dominated by IBM/PC.
In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh, marketing the computer as part of a countercultural lifestyle: romantic, youthful, and creative.
But despite positive sales and superior performance over IBM PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM compatible.
Sculley believed that Jobs was hurting Apple, and company executives began removing him. Not having an official title with the company he co-founded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and thus left Apple in 1985.
pixar
In 1986, Jobs bought an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation Studios.
Believing in Pixar’s potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money in the company.
The studio continued to produce hugely popular movies like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles; Pixar movies have collectively grossed $4 billion.
The studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs the largest shareholder in Disney.
Reinventing Apple
After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs started a new hardware and software company called NeXT, Inc.
The company failed in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to the United States, and Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429 million.
In 1997, Jobs returned to his position as CEO of Apple. Just as Jobs instigated the success of Apple in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s.
With a new management team, modified stock options, and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs got Apple back on track.
Jobs’ clever products (such as the iMac), effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs once again caught the eye of consumers.
macbook
In the years that followed, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, the iPod, and the iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology.
Almost immediately after Apple released a new product, competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies.
The…