I wrote this obituary for The Times in the hope that it would be a balanced portrait of the man amid all the hype and hagiography.
Steve Jobs changed the face not just of home computing — although his impact on that was seismic — but also the nature of how millions of people now buy and listen to music. With a series of sensational technological developments, Apple, the company he co-founded aged 20, drove nothing less than a revolution in communications and entertainment.
Moreover, Jobs and his team were also responsible for changing the way functional electronic items were viewed. Starting from the standpoint that the things they manufactured could also be aesthetically pleasing, they produced a series of startlingly successful designs. There was, as his many admirers often observed, pleasure in merely owning and operating an Apple product. From the wheel with which a collection of thousands of pieces of music could be perused and selected, to the programs that could be activated and explored with the touch of a finger, Jobs fundamentally changed the experience of using electronic devices.
Jobs and Apple won a devoted following, particularly among the creative professions, for his graphical approach to computer design. He was a technological innovator and entrepreneur who made popular consumer electronic devices including the Apple Mac, the iPod, the MacBook, the iPhone and the iPad. He was dismissed from the firm he founded, bounced back to retake control of it and also established Pixar, the animation company that gave the world the Toy Story children’s films.
Jobs traced his interest in making computers and their operating systems beautiful back to his college days. He dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but, rather than severing his links entirely, he hung around and went to classes that interested him, including calligraphy. It was this course, Jobs maintained, that led to the Apple Macintosh computer having multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts.
It was in 1976 that Jobs founded Apple, in his parents’ garage along with his friend and fellow computer enthusiast Steve Wozniak. In 1984 his firm revolutionised the look and feel of the personal computer by launching the Apple Macintosh. Ironically, given Apple’s later reputation for sleek design, the first Apple Mac was a beige box, but it was the first commercially viable personal computer to feature graphics onscreen. For the first time, the machine was operated by moving and manipulating these icons.
Steven Paul Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco, California. His biological parents gave him up for adoption, and he was brought up by working-class parents Justin and Clara Jobs in Mountain View, Santa Clara County. He attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School, Cupertino, where he displayed early “nerdish” tendencies by attending after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard computer company. He got a summer job there and met Wozniak.
His parents, neither of whom went to college, had promised his biological mother that Jobs Jr would benefit from higher education. In 1972, aged 17, Jobs started at Reed College, but he lasted just one semester. Giving a speech at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs recalled: “After six months I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
Jobs experimented with illicit drugs and back-packed round India as a young man. He believed in following his heart, listening to his instincts and trusting his intuition. But although a fan of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Joan Baez, his creative approach to business was coupled with a sometimes ruthless, autocratic nature.
This unconventional single-mindedness and self-belief made Jobs a most conventionally successful businessman. In 2008 Forbes estimated Jobs’s wealth at $5.4 billion, largely thanks to the rise in the value of shares he owned. For many years he awarded himself a salary of just $1 a year. After the dot-com crash in 2000 Apple’s share price suffered along with most other technology companies, but by 2004 it had recovered to where it had been at the height of the bubble, and by early 2007 it had topped $200, valuing the company at nearly $180 billion.
Jobs’s passion and charisma made for flamboyant and spirited presentations at Apple “expos”, where he would unveil new products with great fanfare. He dressed in what became a trademark black turtleneck jumper, jeans and trainers. He had an ability to whip up a quasi-religious fervour for his company and its products through his persuasiveness, vision and salesmanship — a phenomenon that was dubbed by one Apple employee as the Jobs “reality distortion field”. It was a phrase borrowed from Star Trek.
Jobs summed up his philosophy like this: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
He could be irascible, petulant, temperamental and combative, displaying a desire to control all aspects of his personal and working life. The extent of his autocratic tendencies was revealed in 2005 when he banned all books published by John Wiley & Sons from Apple shops in retaliation for it publishing an unauthorised biography by Jeffery S. Young and William L. Simon called iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business. He could also be slow to accept criticism, over Apple’s recycling policies, for example, and the poor quality of some of the earlygeneration iPods.
Some commentators called him egomaniacal; former employees recall being terrified of him. As well as falling out with several chief executives whom he rubbed shoulders with, he also argued with rivals. On one occasion he became embroiled in a war of words with Michael Dell of Dell Computer, lambasting his rival’s company for producing boring products.
Jobs’s fiery temperament and strongly held views affected his business relationships from an early stage. In 1985, with the Apple Mac achieving poor sales, differences with Apple’s chief executive John Sculley over the strategic direction of the company resulted in Jobs being fired from his own company, aged 30. “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone,” he recalled, “and it was devastating.” It was particularly galling for Jobs since he had hired Sculley in the first place.
After leaving Apple, this irrepressible entrepreneur began what he described as “one of the most creative periods of my life”. He founded NeXT Computer where he developed an “object-oriented” approach to computing with the aim of making computers
“interpersonal”; that is, better at collaborating. With this in mind he developed the NeXTMail e-mail system, the first to support embedded graphics and audio. But Jobs’s uncompromising obsession with aesthetics and design made the computers expensive — only 50,000 of the so-called NeXTcubes were sold by 1993.
Then, in 1996, in what Jobs himself described as a “remarkable turn of events”, Apple bought NeXT for $429 million, allowing Jobs to return to the company he co-founded. He muscled his way back to the top to become interim chief executive the following year, refocusing the company on profitability. Several development projects were jettisoned with a steely ruthlessness. But much of the innovative, but hitherto commercially unsuccessful, technology developed at NeXT eventually made its way into Apple products, such as the operating system that was to become the Mac OS X.
Apple’s reputation for innovative, attractive design was cemented with the launch of the iMac in 1998. While most personal computers were continuing along utilitarian lines, the iMac, designed by an Englishman, Jonathan Ive, was curvaceous and colourful. To some it gave the desktop computer pretentions as an objet d’art. But from a commercial perspective the dominance of Microsoft’s Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer web browser was almost total.
While Apple won design plaudits it never managed to achieve more than a minority share of the home computer market, despite an almost fanatical following which rightly praised the Mac as being less prone to viruses and other computer gremlins. Whether or not this was to do with hackers simply focusing their attention on the more successful Windows operating system and Internet Explorer web browser, rather than any inherent inferiority of design, has always been hotly contested. Nevertheless Apple devotees delighted in portraying the Microsoft founder Bill Gates as some kind of technology Antichrist. The Mac versus Microsoft PC rivalry became emblematic of a clash of cultures: imaginative creativity versus workaday office processor.
It was not enough to guarantee Apple’s continuing success, however. Commercial imperatives meant that Jobs had to innovate again. He had the vision to branch out into entertainment, developing the iPod solid-state digital music player which was launched in 2001. As the Macintosh revolutionised personal computing, so the iPod revolutionised music listening, just as the Sony Walkman had done before it.
The iPod, with its distinctive white body and earphones and remarkable ability to store thousands of music tracks on one small hard drive, instantly became the “must have” consumer gadget. But iPod became especially successful, commercially, because Apple also launched the proprietary iTunes digital media player at the same time and followed this up two years later with the iTunes Store. It created a powerful vertically-integrated music distribution business.
Critics accused Apple of putting a stranglehold on digital distribution and encouraging the demise of the long-playing album. But by late 2008, when Apple had sold more than 110 million iPods and more than three billion songs from its iTunes online store, the music industry was obliged to accept that the way consumers bought and listened to music had changed irrevocably.
The iPod embedded itself in popular culture to such a degree that the noun and verb “podcast”, meaning to create programmes specifically for downloading on to iPod players or other similar portable devices, entered the English language.
Apple, with Jobs firmly at the helm, then surpassed its reputation for aesthetically pleasing technological innovation with the launch of the touch-screen iPhone in 2007, Apple’s first foray into the mobile phone sector. It was greeted by Apple devotees with almost reverential awe, as Jobs cemented his place in history as the high priest of “tech-chic”. The iPhone was not the first product to unite the separate functions of mobile phone, personal organiser and media player on one device, but Apple’s flair for design and marketing nous meant that it captured the public imagination.
Quoting Wayne Gretzky, the famous ice hockey player, Jobs once said: “ ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will.”
The ceaseless flow of innovation continued with various upgrades of Apple’s consumer product fleet, but it was the launch of the iPad in January 2010 that proved to be another game-changer. This multi-touch sensitive tablet computer, with its trademark minimalist, sleek design, took portable computing to the next level. Apple sold nearly 20 million iPads in its first year of production and provoked a flurry of copycat tablets from rival manufacturers.
To have enjoyed a successful career in one field would be achievement enough for most people. But Jobs had two. After leaving Apple in 1985 and setting up NeXT, he also acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, the creators of the Star Wars franchise, the following year. This company became Pixar Animation Studios, which pioneered advanced computer generated imagery (CGI) animation, and went on to create many hugely successful digitally animated children’s films, such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, and The Incredibles, in partnership with the Walt Disney Company. Pixar won more than 20 Academy Awards. In 2006 Disney took over Pixar in an all-share deal that valued the studio at $7.4 billion.
Jobs took up a position on the Disney board and became its largest single shareholder. This brought him into conflict with Disney’s chief executive, Michael Eisner. But this time it was Jobs who was victorious in the boardroom battle and Eisner left.
In 2006 Jobs became embroiled in an accounting scandal involving backdated stock options. The US Securities and Exchange Commission charged two senior Apple officials with improperly handling the stock options that had been granted to Apple executives, including Jobs, in 2001. While backdating options is not illegal, they do have to be accounted for properly, and this wasn’t done. An internal investigation revealed that Jobs knew about some of the options backdating but apparently did not benefit personally. He escaped censure.
Jobs was given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2004 and was told that he had three to six months to live. But it turned out to be a rare, less aggressive form of cancer and a tumour was successfully removed. However, speculation about his health dogged him for his remaining years, particularly when he appeared at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in August 2006 looking, in some people’s eyes, gaunt and showing none of his usual energy.
Such speculation led to an unfortunate error by the financial newswire Bloomberg which inadvertently published an obituary of Jobs in August 2008, much to its embarrassment. The mistake gave Jobs the opportunity to quote the famous Mark Twain riposte, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.
But the health problems returned and Jobs had a liver transplant in 2009, then went on indefinite sick leave in January this year citing undisclosed health problems. In August he announced that he was stepping down from his position as chief executive. The share price of Apple, which in the same month had briefly become the world’s largest company, worth about $350 billion, fell by 5 per cent amid market anxiety about his succession. Jobs’s personal wealth was estimated to be more than $8 billion.
His journalist daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, was born in 1978, just as Apple was experiencing significant growth. Her mother, Chris-Ann Brennan, was for a time forced to bring Lisa up on welfare after Jobs initially refused to accept paternity. He later expressed regret for the way he had handled the situation when he had found out he was about to become a father. Apple’s Lisa computer, a powerful personal computer which was its first to feature a graphical user interface, is believed to have been named after his daughter, although the company later said that Lisa stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture.
Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene Powell, whom he married in 1991, and by four children.
Steven Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar, was born on February 24, 1955. He died of cancer on October 5, 2011, aged 56
