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Steve Jobs: A Biography

Walter isaacson.

630 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2011

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“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.” — From Apple commercial, and one of my favorite quotes. And it describes Steve Jobs perfectly.

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” Can we have that as a rule of life? Please?

“Then he paused for a second and said, “Yeah, but sometimes, I think it’s just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you’re gone.” And then he paused again and said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.”

- Remove everything that is unnecessary. - Be ruthless about building an A team. - Make stuff you believe in. - Collaborate often through vigorous discussion. - Push yourself and others to do the impossible now. - Make great experiences by simplifying. - Own your work and protect it. - Live at intersection of intellect and intuition.

"The people who invited the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently. The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence."

"What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great."

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

That summer of 1972, after his graduation, he and Brennan moved to a cabin in the hills above Los Altos. “I’m going to go live in a cabin with Chrisann,” he announced to his parents one day. His father was furious. “No you’re not,” he said. “Over my dead body.” They had recently fought about marijuana, and once again the younger Jobs was willful. He just said good-bye and walked out.

One day Jobs walked into the lobby of the video game manufacturer Atari and wanted to be hired there, and told the personnel director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and attire, that he wouldn’t leave until they gave him a job. :D

The Atari experience helped shape Jobs’s approach to business and design. He appreciated the user friendliness of Atari’s insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons games. “That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron Wayne. Jobs also absorbed some of Bushnell’s take-non-prisoners attitude. “Nolan wouldn’t take no for an answer,” according to Alcorn, “and this was Steve’s first impression of how things got done. Nolan was never abusive, like Steve sometimes is. But he had the same driven attitude. It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done. In that way Nolan was a mentor for Jobs.”

I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.

Because I didn't know how it couldn't be done, I was enabled to do it.

We would go to the Mac building at eleven at night,” Sculley recalled, “and they would bring Jobs code to show. In some cases he wouldn’t even look at it. He would just take it and throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can you turn it down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they can do better.’”

Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”

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The Spinoff

Books December 22, 2019

The steve jobs biography is a monster that won’t stop spawning.

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Eight years after publication, Walter Isaacson’s “iBio” Steve Jobs remains massively influential. Danyl Mclauchlan examines how the deeply flawed genius the book revealed continues to manifest. 

I t’s the end of the decade, and my social media aggregators are filled with lists of the best, most influential books of the last 10 years. For most writers and critics the best books and the most influential books seems to be the same thing, and I always look at these lists and wonder: “Are there books out there making the world a worse place, inadvertently or not?”

Whenever I finish a book I take a photo of the front cover. Then I put the image in a folder, and at the end of the year I print them all out. But I’m only allowed to print out covers of books that I’ve read to the end. This ritual is designed to combat my chronic habit of starting a book then getting distracted by another book and never finishing anything. 

It’s also a rudimentary reading diary, and scrolling through these folders at the end of the decade I see that most books I finish fall into a couple of categories. There’s a high proportion that I enjoyed but never thought about again (mostly contemporary literary fiction). There are books I’m obsessed with and keep rereading (mostly popular science writing, science fiction, essays, and memoirs: all of these genres are enjoying a prolonged golden age). 

And then there’s the books I didn’t fall in love with, but which lots of other people did, and so turned out to be a lot more influential than the books I liked. Like Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s biography of “the greatest CEO of all time”. This was published back in 2011, shortly after Jobs’ death. I read it in 2016 and I enjoyed it but didn’t love it. 

But I find myself thinking about it more and more. Partly because Steve Jobs is a very popular book. I see people reading it on the bus; usually the bus to university; usually a guy who is obviously studying engineering or compsci, maybe design. It’s still on the stands at airport bookstores: when I travel I usually spot a couple copies on the plane, being read by Accenture or PWC types. And when I visited Xero a few years ago I saw at least three different copies scattered around workspaces. In less than a decade, Steve Jobs has established itself as a central text in the tech nerd literary canon, up there with the Foundation books; 1979’s Godel, Escher, Bach; and Genius , the James Gleick biography of physicist Richard Feynman.   

But the appeal is wider than that. Goodreads curates lists of books across different categories and ranks them according to user ratings. In “popular technology” Steve Jobs is first on the list with over 850,000 ratings. The second entry – The Shallows , by Nicolas Carr – has just over 20,000. Steve Jobs is the most popular biography, the most popular business biography, one of the most popular entries in the “books I want to read” category. It’s huge. 

And Steve Jobs shows up in interesting places. Like Bad Blood , the 2018 book on the Theranos scandal by John Carreyrou, the reporter who broke the story. Theranos was a fraudulent multi-billion biotech company based in Silicon Valley, and the founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was briefly the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, but is now bankrupt and awaiting trial on multiple charges of criminal conspiracy. Holmes was obsessed with Jobs, and with Isaacson’s book. She dressed like Jobs. She listened to his favourite music (Dylan, the Beatles). She drank the same kale smoothies. She treated her staff with the same brutal, withering contempt. She hired former Apple staff in an attempt to appropriate her guru’s aura, and she tried to imitate Jobs’ famous “reality distortion field”, in which teams of brilliant experts told Jobs something couldn’t be done, and he’d declare they were wrong, and would (sometimes) be proved right. The staff at Theranos, Carreyrou writes, “were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’ career she was impersonating”.

A lot of modern tech CEOs worship at the altar of Jobs. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey describes him as “a mentor from afar”; Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel has a portrait of Jobs in his office; Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick – forced out by his board after a rolling series of scandals revealing that the company’s internal culture was toxic beyond belief – wore the black turtleneck and, after he was fired, announced that he was “Steve Jobsing it”, meaning he’d return to take over his old company once it self-destructed in his absence. 

Jobs is also worshipped by people like Adam Neumann, the former CEO of WeWork, a cult-like property management start-up that wasn’t a tech company in any conceivable way, but managed to convince their investors that it was, thus inflating WeWork’s valuation by several orders of magnitude (at its height the company was valued at $47 billion USD, even though it was losing billions a year and had no IP, virtually no assets, and a business model indistinguishable from its profitable, established competitors). Just like Steve Jobs, Neumann announced that his company’s goal was to “elevate the world’s consciousness”. Although Neumann dabbled in Kabbalah rather than Zen, reportedly basing his company’s first bond offering on auspicious numerological combinations then adding on a couple more million. And from this Vanity Fair take on Neumann’s catastrophic leadership style and failed IPO: 

After sitting with Neumann in his office, outfitted with a Peloton bike, infrared sauna, and cold water plunge, Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson told Fast Company that Neumann reminded him of the Apple cofounder. Neumann later told colleagues that Isaacson might write his biography. (Isaacson never considered writing such a book.)

Isaacson’s Jobs biography does four things very convincingly: he shows us that Steve Jobs was (a) a genius, (b) a hateful and poisonous human being, (c) prone to making stupid mistakes that no person of even average intelligence would ever make, and (d) a very eclectic, unique personality, at least until half the tech industry started imitating him. 

Isaacson doesn’t really tie these things together. He’s mildly censorious of the fact that Jobs is such a monster (for example, on his deathbed he told his estranged daughter that she smelled like a toilet). The sustained awfulness of his personality detracted from his accomplishments, his biographer feels. 

And the eclecticism is just part of the package. We forget how weird Jobs was because most of his behaviour – meditation, bare feet, bizarre fasts and extreme diets, taking LSD, press releases and product launches filled with mystical pronouncements about changing the world and saving the universe – are now standard tech culture affectations. But they were all unprecedentedly weird things for a business executive to do back when Jobs first did them, and they were a big part of him being fired by his own company in the mid-1980s. It feels like there’s a stronger link than Isaacson admits between Jobs being brilliant and visionary, Jobs making dumb decisions even though everyone begged him not to (NeXT computers, the iPhone 4 antennae, countless other product failures, trying to cure his operable cancer with juice fasts), Jobs being generally very weird, and Jobs behaving in ways that were unacceptable to most other humans. 

Steve Jobs is very tolerant of the chaotic and disruptive nature of modern tech culture, but the most interesting apologia for tech contrarianism is Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Silicon Valley philosopher-king, sinister billionaire and honorary New Zealand citizen, Peter Thiel.   

Thiel’s ideas are influenced by the conservative thinker René Girard, who argued that humans are a “memetic” species: most of our thoughts, beliefs, values and desires come from simply imitating one another’s behaviour, especially that of high ranking/high status members of our society or in-group. Girard was a literary philosopher but his disciples like to point to the recent neuroscience literature on mirror neurons – brain cells found in primate species that facilitate learning by firing when we mirror the behaviour of another animal – to validate his model. 

The way memetic imitation plays out in a capitalist society, according to Thiel, is that most aspiring entrepreneurs copy people or businesses that already exist. But if you can do this then so can anyone else, and you’ll find yourself trapped in a zero sum state of competition: a race to the bottom on price or profit, cognate to the self-defeating vision of capitalism you find in Marx. Thiel thinks an obsession with competition and “disruption” is one of the main things that’s wrong with contemporary business culture ( real capitalism, he declares, is the opposite of competition). All you accomplish by imitating existing success is increasing the availability of that product from one to n. What you need to do is build something that no one else is producing and establish a monopoly on it, i.e. to take a product “from zero to one”. 

By monopoly Thiel means a new, previously unimagined product or service that’s so superior no one can realistically compete against you. Most successful companies accomplish this via a mixture of proprietary technology, scale and network effects. If you want to compete against Google you have to build a better search engine, a better planet-sized IT infrastructure, and a better advertising platform. If you want to compete against Amazon you have to build a global network of AI optimised and roboticised warehouses and be able to compete against Jeff Bezos on price as he undersells you for years until you go bankrupt. To compete against Facebook you need to offer people a social network that has more of their friends on it than Facebook does. Try to be at least 10 times better than any viable competitor, Thiel helpfully suggests. 

Or you can use marketing to convince customers that your product is unique. Thiel’s example of this is Steve Jobs. Jobs invented new products, but he also understood branding in a really deep, contrarian way. He was the first titan of capitalism to commodify the anticonsumerist counterculture ethos of the 1960s and use it to sell luxury brand consumer products. Nobody else thought of that. And incredibly this still works. Apple is the world’s first trillion dollar company, but many of its most loyal customers still believe that to buy its products – even queuing up for them overnight – is to signify themselves as free thinking radicals. 

Thiel believes that the best contrarian ideas emerge from start-ups, by which he means small, innovative, entrepreneurial organisations. The Royal Society. The US’ ‘Founding Fathers’. Fairchild Semiconductor. It’s hard to do anything in big bureaucratic organisations and even harder to get anything done by yourself. This aligns with a point that Isaacson makes in his less popular, non-Steve-Jobs related history of digital technology, The Innovators . Most of the breakthroughs in the digital revolution emerged from small collaborative teams or partnerships, usually involving a contrarian visionary who finds someone to put their impossible dreams into practice, a tradition he traces all the way back to Lovelace and Babbage. Turing in Hut 8. Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. 

Forming collaborative partnerships is exactly what Steve Jobs did for the productive components of his career. But as a career path, being a contrarian visionary who grows up in Silicon Valley and is childhood friends with Wozniak at the dawn of the digital age is difficult to emulate. Which goes a long way towards explaining why contemporary tech executives read the Jobs biography then dress up in black turtlenecks, drink kale smoothies, babble about mysticism and scream at their staff. Those Steve-Jobs-like qualities are all really easy to imitate. And, true to Thiel’s memetic theory of human nature, there are venture capitalists handing out billions of dollars to these people because they’re being contrarian and unconventional in a way that is now deeply conventional and orthodox.   

The world is full of people who think they’re radicals or contrarians or critical thinkers because they can regurgitate online conspiracy theories or ideologies they were indoctrinated with at university. But being an actual freethinker is rare. Thiel boils it down to one simple formula: you have to believe that there are secrets in the world that have not yet been discovered – and that you are a person who can unearth them and “bring them to market”. But he describes the proportion of people and companies that succeed at this as following a power law distribution: almost all of them fail – the key is that they fail fast – while the tiny proportion that succeed then enjoy monopolistic power over the new, uncontested sphere of the global economy that they’ve conjured up. “A great company,” Thiel writes, “is a conspiracy to change the world.” If they succeed, they become the Facebooks, Googles, Apples and Amazons; the Zuckerbergs, Musks, Thiels, Bezos and Jobs. They rule, serene and primal, while the rest of us scurry about thinking conventional thoughts and memetically cooperating with or competing against one another because that’s what everyone else does.   

J obs’ iconic “Think Different” campaign, launched in 1997, turned Bob Dylan, Picasso, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Albert Einstein into brand ambassadors for Apple Corporation and celebrated “the crazy ones”:   

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Thiel makes a convincing argument that in a technological global marketplace, the people best placed to beat the efficient market hypothesis and change the world are less like Einstein or Gandhi and a lot more like Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel: i.e. brilliant contrarians who are also ruthless capitalists with contempt for conventional values and institutions, and who specialise in maximising their wealth and power while avoiding any responsibility or accountability. (One of Jobs’ most profitable innovations at Apple was the company’s labyrinthine tax structure, artfully designed to ensure that the most valuable corporation in the world paid as little tax as possible. Yet another Jobs invention that the rest of tech vigorously imitates.) Thiel celebrates the empowerment of contrarian tech visionaries because he’s one of them; he thinks the process needs to be accelerated. Despite the superficial appearances of change we live in an age of technological stagnation, he warns. We’re not building the future fast enough. 

It feels pretty fast though. Thiel invested in Facebook in 2004; Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007. At the end of 2019 there are billions of smartphones, billions of Facebook users, ubiquitous new high speed wireless networks so that we can always be connected, all of the time. And we’re still discovering the fishhooks hidden inside these new products: that contrary to all the connectivity rhetoric they’re also isolating, antisocial technologies; that they’re designed to surveil, commodify and modify our behaviour. If you think you’re too smart to be influenced by modern advertising, Thiel warns his readers, you’re being fooled twice.   

More Reading

Steve Jobs died in October of 2011. Steve Jobs was published three weeks later. The important literary books of that year are almost entirely forgotten but people are still reading the Jobs biography. It allows for multiple interpretations: some readers conclude that if you imitate his extravagant personality – describe your business in spiritual terms; always park in mobility-parking spots; lie about almost everything; treat everyone around you with contempt – you’ll flourish in the tech industry. And some of those people (Holmes, Neumann, Kalanick) are correct at least for a while.   

But there’s a deeper reading. An esoteric reading, as Thiel might say: that the deeper premise at the heart of Jobs’ life is true. If you really think differently you can use technology to change the world. You can bet against the conventions and assumptions and core values of your own society, and if you win you can build the future and no one can stop you. It’s an idea that sounded a lot better at the start of the decade than it does at the end of it. Because the deeper we get into the future designed and controlled by contrarian geniuses – who resist any accountability for their power because, like Jobs, they’re locked into a perception of themselves as anti-establishment radicals – the bleaker and more frightening it seems to the rest of us. 

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (Knopf, $25) is available from Unity Books.

The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books , recently named 2020 International Book Store of the Year, London Book Fair, and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books Wellington or Unity Books Auckland online stores today. 

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Steve Jobs biography review

Tina is an Editor at Large for EW

After the spate of obituaries and articles, is there anything left to learn about the man who turned personal computing into a pleasure — and then a necessity — for so many of us? In a word, yes. In Steve Jobs , Walter Isaacson (pictured below) — the former editor of Time who has previously written biographies of Einstein and Franklin — has given us a nuanced portrait of the brilliant, mercurial, complicated genius who rethought and reimagined computers, movies, phones, music, and tablet computers.

It isn’t always a pretty picture. The sleek, polished Apple devices that are so much a part of our lives, that we dandle so comfortably in our hands, sprang almost entirely from Jobs’ imagination — “endowed with his DNA,” as Isaacson says — and at Apple, he assembled a team that could build them. The simplicity and perfection that Jobs sought, that he demanded, came at a price, and Isaacson reveals that price in a way no one ever has before. Working for Jobs was like riding a wild, manic roller-coaster: Some days he goaded and bullied his staff into delivering better work than they thought possible. Other days he might approve an idea or innovation in a half-hour meeting (the kind of thing that would drag out for months at other companies). Then he could turn again on a dime, ignoring key staffers when gifting coveted Apple stock. His family got the same loving/cruel treatment: Until he was sued, he did not pay child support for his first child, Lisa, his daughter with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (behavior he regretted later in life). Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell admitted to Isaacson, “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth.” He punished himself, too, going on bizarre fasts, subsisting on a single food, such as carrot salad or apples, for weeks on end — even after his cancer was diagnosed. His daughter Lisa perhaps put it best when he said, “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint.” Even on his deathbed, Jobs’ ever-fevered creativity did not flag: “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” he told Isaacson. “It would be seamlessly synced with with all your devices.”

If occasionally workmanlike, Isaacson’s thoughtful, broadly-sourced bio is thorough, filling in all the holes in Jobs’ life, especially the years after he returned to Apple. My only quibble is a small one: Though the jacket is gorgeous (perhaps because Jobs himself had a hand in it), the book’s interior feels cheaply done, with thin paper and an unremarkable font. As I hefted it, I thought, If only it measured up to Jobs’ exacting design standards. But no matter, really. What’s important is that Isaacson has taken the complete measure of the man. This is a biography as big as Steve Jobs. A-

MORE STEVE JOBS BIOGRAPHY:

Steve Jobs: Famous folks he met and what he thought about them

Steve Jobs’ food weirdnesses: Fasts, living on apples or carrots for weeks on end, fruit smoothie diets

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Key excerpts from Steve Jobs' biography

A new biography of late Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs hit book-shelves on Monday, offering arguably the most comprehensive, insightful look to date at the life and times of the revered technology visionary.

Below are excerpts from the tome, penned by Walter Isaacson, relating to Apple and Jobs' sometimes stormy, often difficult relationship with Silicon Valley, partners and rivals, and how Jobs communicated his key business beliefs.

JOBS' RESIGNATION AS CEO:

Jobs was wheeled into a board meeting on August 24, 2011, the day he handed Apple's reins to Tim Cook.

As Jobs' health deteriorated, he wrestled with the decision for weeks, discussing it with his wife, board member Bill Campbell, design chief Jonathan Ive and attorney George Riley.

When he finally made up his mind, arrangements were made to have him driven to 1 Infinite Loop and wheeled into the boardroom as secretly as possible.

"One of the things I wanted to do for Apple was to set an example of how do you transfer power right," Jobs told Isaacson. He added later that evening that his hope was to remain as active as his health allowed.

MAKING AN ENEMY OUT OF GOOGLE INC:

Isaacson's account of Jobs' blow-up over Google's entry into the smartphone market underscores the subsequent animosity he bore toward one-time Apple board member Eric Schmidt.

Jobs felt betrayed because Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had treated him very much as a mentor. In 2008, he got into a shouting match with the pair, as well as with Android chief Andy Rubin, at Google's headquarters.

Jobs had offered Google an icon or two on the iPhone's home page; but in January 2010, HTC released a phone with multi-touch and other iPhone-like features that prompted Jobs to sue.

"Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.' Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this," Jobs told Isaacson the week after the suit was filed.

"They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products -- Android, Google Docs -- are shit."

Schmidt met with Jobs for coffee days later, but Jobs remained enraged and nothing was resolved.

"We've got you red-handed," Jobs told Schmidt. "I'm not interested in settling. I don't want your money, If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android."

ON APPLE'S INTEGRATED APPROACH:

Jobs' infuriation stemmed partly from a fundamental conflict between Android's open-source approach and his own belief in a closed, carefully controlled ecosystem.

"We do these things not because we are control freaks," he said.

Addressing users' concerns, he said: "They are busy doing whatever it is they do best, and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices."

"Look at the results -- Android's a mess .... We do it not to make money. We do it because we want to make great products, not crap like Android."

FLASH TIRADE GOT PERSONAL

Jobs' well-known tirade against Adobe Systems Inc's Flash multimedia software may have had its roots in the 1980s. Apple had invested in Adobe in 1985 and they collaborated to popularize desktop publishing.

But in 1999, Jobs -- after returning to Apple -- had asked Adobe to make its video-editing software available for the new iMac but the company refused, focusing instead on Microsoft Windows. Soon after, founder John Warnock retired.

"I helped put Adobe on the map," Jobs told Isaacson. "The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left. He was the inventor, the person I related to. It's been a bunch of suits since then, and the company has turned out crap."

APPLE'S CONTROL OVER APPS, AND CENSORSHIP

Isaacson describes an exchange with Ryan Tate, editor of the tech gossip site Valleywag, that offers glimpses into Jobs' steadfast belief in carefully curating the types of applications available for downloading on the iPhone.

Tate emailed Jobs decrying Apple's heavy-handedness and asked: "If (Bob) Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company .... Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution'? Revolutions are about freedom."

According to Tate, Jobs replied after midnight: "Yep ... freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is."

When Tate mentioned pornography was just fine with him and his wife, Jobs got snarky. "You might care about porn when you have kids. ... By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others' work and belittle their motivations."

Tate told Isaacson he was impressed by Jobs' willingness to spar one-on-one with bloggers and customers.

ANTENNAGATE ... AND REED

"Antennagate" -- a faulty iPhone 4 antenna design that caused occasional dropped calls -- received a mountain of publicity, and Jobs came out publicly to acknowledge the mistake and announce a fix. But one little-known incident came to light in Isaacson's book.

Jobs, alerted to the possible defect while in Hawaii, first became defensive, then anguished in a conversation with director Art Levinson. Jobs brushed him off. But where Levinson failed, then-COO Tim Cook prevailed -- by quoting someone as saying Apple was becoming the new Microsoft.

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by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2011

Jobs was an American original, and Isaacson's impeccably researched, vibrant biography—fully endorsed by his subject—does...

An unforgettable tale of a one-of-a-kind visionary.

With a unique ability to meld arts and technology and an uncanny understanding of consumers' desires, Apple founder Steve Jobs (1955–2011) played a major role in transforming not just computer technology, but a variety of industries. When Jobs died earlier this month, the outpouring of emotion from the general public was surprisingly intense. His creations, which he knew we wanted before we did, were more than mere tools; everything from the iPod to the MacBook Pro touched us on a gut level and became an integral part of our lives. This was why those of us who were hip to Steve Jobs the Inventor were so moved when he passed. However, those who had an in-depth knowledge of Steve Jobs the Businessman might not have taken such a nostalgic view of his life. According to acclaimed biographer and Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson ( American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and a Heroes of a Hurricane , 2009, etc.) in this consistently engaging, warts-and-all biography, Jobs was not necessarily the most pleasant boss. We learn about Jobs' predilection for humiliating his co-workers into their best performances; his habit of profanely dismissing an underling's idea, only to claim it as his own later; and his ability to manipulate a situation with an evangelical, fact-mangling technique that friends and foes alike referred to as his "reality distortion field." But we also learn how—through his alternative education, his pilgrimage to India, a heap of acid trips and a fateful meeting with engineering genius Steve Wozniak—Jobs became Jobs and Apple became Apple. Though the narrative could have used a tighter edit in a few places, Isaacson's portrait of this complex, often unlikable genius is, to quote Jobs, insanely great.

Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4516-4853-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | BUSINESS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Walter Isaacson

by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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Humanizing technology: The 100-year legacy of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs looks to the sky as he presents on stage at an Apple Event.

Editor's note: ZDNET originally published this article on Oct. 5, 2011 and it's being republished in memory of the passing of Steve Jobs.  

Who is doing the most important work in the tech world and which technologies are going to have the largest long-term impact on humanity? Those are questions I dedicate some brain cycles to thinking about every week. I like to ask, "Which of these things could have ripples that will last for a century or more?"

In tech, the truth is that most of the stuff we fret over, rave about, or argue bitterly will be barely recognizable 100 years from now. In most cases, even the staggering developments in tech over the past decade will morph into other products, be absorbed into new companies, and simply become the tiny seeds of brilliant new ideas championed by future generations of innovators. That's just the natural order of things.

Also:  Steve Jobs' big lesson: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish'

What I look for are the exceptions. And, there are always exceptions.

Steve Jobs was one of them.

Since  his retirement as Apple CEO on August 24, 2011 and  his passing on October 5, 2011, there have been lots of well-written retrospectives about how Jobs helped usher in the personal computer era and transform four different industries -- PCs, mobile phones, music, and animated movies -- and bring Apple back from economic oblivion to become the most valuable company on the planet.

All of that stuff is fascinating and significant and will be talked about for years to come. However, I'd assert that Jobs's ultimate legacy will be something else entirely.

It won't be about money. It won't be about his famed "reality distortion field." It won't be about his brilliance as a marketer. It won't even be about an Apple product -- or, at least not one specific product.

Steve Jobs's most important contribution will be that he made technology about people and not about technology. The entire thrust of his career was about building useful tools that adapt themselves to the ways people already think and work, rather than asking people to retrain themselves to learn how to use their machines.

Also: Apple Lisa was a huge leap forward. Now you can download its source code

While other tech leaders have given lip service to similar ideas -- especially in the past decade following Apple's recent successes -- only Jobs has been able to thoroughly inculcate this concept into a company and all of the products that it produces.

The best example I've found of Jobs himself talking about humanizing technology came from Macworld Expo 1997 in a question and answer session. Here's what he said:

One of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. I've made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room and I've got the scar tissue to prove it, and I know that it's the case. As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with 'What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?' [It's] not starting with 'Let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how are we going to market that?'

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone in 2007 in the defining moment of his career.

Keep in mind that this whole idea of human-centric technology is a rejection of the foundation of the computer industry, with its codes, keyboard commands, and programming languages.

It's probably going to take a couple of decades for other technology leaders and companies to fully grasp, internalize, and institutionalize this change. But, make no mistake, they will. Today's technology companies and the tech companies of the future will embrace human-centric product development as an answer to the current design bankruptcy in tech and as the next stage in tech product design. Lots of companies are already taking baby steps in that direction -- take a look at companies like ASUS, HTC, and Microsoft (with Windows Phone 7).

Also: Watch Kevin Costner's very 80s Apple commercial

While Steve Jobs left Apple in good shape and the company will almost certainly continue to be a leader in this area, Jobs's impact will be even greater outside of Apple as hundreds of tech companies are destined to emulate Apple's product design approach in the decades ahead. Within 20 years, every tech company is going to be about human-centric product design, and for decades after that I expect they will continue to perfect the idea until its roots at Apple become almost completely obscured. A century from now, it will be historians who will trace the idea back to the Apple co-founder.

For those who don't want to wait that long and want to start thinking about and paving the way for human-centric product design in tech, I'd recommend not spending a whole lot of time studying Jobs himself and obsessing over all of forthcoming documentaries and studies of his life. Instead, do what Steve did: push yourself to learn, grow, and expand your worldview outside of technology.

In fact, the career of Steve Jobs may be the single greatest impetus for a liberal arts education in modern history. Although Steve never finished his undergraduate degree at Reed College, he spent his time there taking the classes he was passionately interested in, rather than following the standard schedule of courses. For example, he famously took a calligraphy class that deepened his interest in typography and he later used that knowledge to push for the excellent on-screen fonts in the original Macintosh, which of course, greatly influenced the use of fonts in Microsoft Windows as well.

Also: You know Apple's origin story but do you know Samsung's? It's almost too bonkers to believe

The point here is that, as much as Steve Jobs loved technology, he was also deeply curious about other aspects of life, such as music, world culture, and philosophy, and his life experiences in those areas had a significant impact on his humanistic approach to technology.

Jobs even traveled to India after he dropped out of Reed College. Although he didn't find the enlightenment he was looking for, his travels helped solidify some of his ideas about what he wanted to do with his life and the impact he could make back in America. During the trip to India, Jobs  reported , "I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together."

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs at the Genius Bar.

All of this, of course, advocates for a liberal arts education and a variety of life experiences in order to help you think bigger, understand life from lots of different perspectives, and discover more things that you're passionate about.

If you've already completed your degree, are in the middle of your career, or simply don't have the budget or freedom to travel or go back to school, then you can always take the more grassroots approach, as Jobs did. Go to a museum, volunteer for a nonprofit, take Tai Chi, learn another language, do something creative like paint, write a story, or play an instrument. Travel the world, when you get the chance.

As touchy-feely as that might sound, if you want to think creatively and you want to start looking at tech from the standpoint of how humans can approach the tools, then this is the kind of thinking you'll need to do. There's no better evidence for it than the life and career of Steve Jobs, and the next 100 years are going to show just how far ahead of his time he was, and how many companies are going to emulate his approach to humanizing technology.

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• Personality

Why Was Steve Jobs Sometimes So Mean?

Understanding the nasty edge of his personality..

Posted November 5, 2011

The publication of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs stimulated a flurry of comments. Many rhapsodized about the brilliant devices Jobs introduced. But others were mainly concerned with his personality .

Some commentators emphasized Jobs' positive side: exceptional creativity , relentless pursuit of excellence, and his ability to inspire extremely talented people. But others focused on his flaws, many of which Isaacson chronicled. One was his callous treatment of his earliest colleagues, including Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple whom Jobs befriended in high school, and Daniel Kottke, his college roommate and an early Apple employee. Another was his abandonment of his pregnant and needy girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan and his initial denial of the paternity of their daughter, Lisa, even in the face of DNA evidence. To Maureen Dowd what stood out in the biography was that Jobs "was capable of frightening coldness even with his oldest collaborators and his family."

Jobs' coldness also offended many members of the general public. As one put it on a popular website: "I can't say I was ever fond of Jobs as a person but man did I hate his guts after hearing about the way he treated people... He's done a handful of cool things in his life... But he rides on the back of engineers who get no thanks so that he can take most of the credit. He treats others like trash and considered them expendable and replaceable. Not the kind of guy I'd be friends with."

Jobs' capacity to trash people wasn't restricted to those he knew. When addressing a group he would sometimes respond to a straightforward question from a stranger with a merciless harangue. To, Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple engineer who stayed friends with Jobs, this didn't make sense. As he told Walter Isaacson "The one question I'd love Steve to answer is: ‘Why are you sometimes so mean?'"

Isaacson was also puzzled by this "nasty edge of his personality." So, too, were Jobs' family members who "wondered whether he simply lacked the filter that restrains people from venting their wounding thoughts or willfully bypassed it." But Jobs considered this behavior quite natural. When Isaacson asked Jobs Hertzfeld's question about his meanness he replied: "This is who I am and you can't expect me to be someone I'm not."

I think it's reasonable to conclude that Jobs was right, and that he may well have recognized that his mean streak was tightly linked to aspects of his personality that served him very well. One of these was his belief that he was so special that he was entitled to do whatever he wanted. Sometimes called narcissism , Jobs' sense of specialness gave him the confidence to take big risks and to inspire colleagues and customers. But it also gave him the license to take advantage of others without paying attention to their feelings or needs. And this, in turn, led him to be mean in two ways: through indifference, because he simply didn't realize that he was hurting someone; and through explicit attack if he detected the slightest hint that he was being challenged, especially by an underling or a person he didn't respect.

Another of Jobs' major characteristics, sometimes called compulsiveness, also had both productive and dark sides. This pattern includes Jobs' perfectionism , his insistence on complete control, and his meticulous attention to detail, all of which played a part in the creation of Apple's exceptional products. But his compulsiveness could also provoke anger if someone tried to get him to lower his standards or disagreed with his view of what was "insanely great."

Even Jobs' most transcendent characteristic, which psychologists call openness to experience , was not an unmitigated blessing. It includes his exceptional love of ideas, novelty, and beauty, which greatly enriched both his personal and professional life. But Jobs' esthetic sense was so strongly held that it sometimes caused him to look down his nose when he encountered people who lacked his sensibilities.

In Isaacson's view Jobs could have (and should have) controlled his disagreeable behavior. He could certainly be effusive and charming, and I can personally testify to his capacity to be friendly and considerate. But Jobs just wanted to be who he was, on his terms.

When we judge a person most of us are innately wired to pay closest attention to kindness and fairness. Observing kindness raises our sprits whereas unfairness triggers contempt, and these emotional reactions color our overall impression. The result, in Jobs case, is that many, like the commentator I cited, "hate his guts after hearing about the way he treated people."

But seeing Jobs' meanness in the context of his stunning virtues helps put it in perspective. He was, after all, admirable and remarkable in so many ways---truly special. Even though, from a moral viewpoint, his personal operating system was less perfect than that of his glorious machines.

Samuel Barondes, M.D., is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and the author of Making Sense of People.

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In 1976, Steve Jobs cofounded Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs’ guidance, the company pioneered a series of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.

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Quick Facts

Steve jobs’ parents and adoption, early life and education, founding and leaving apple computer inc., creating next, steve jobs and pixar, returning to and reinventing apple, wife and children, pancreatic cancer diagnosis and health challenges, death and last words, movies and book about steve jobs, who was steve jobs.

Steve Jobs was an American inventor, designer, and entrepreneur who was the cofounder, chief executive, and chairman of Apple Inc. Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different pursuits before cofounding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar Animation Studios, then returned to Apple more than a decade later. The tech giant’s revolutionary products, which include the iPhone, iPad, and iPod, have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Jobs died in 2011 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

FULL NAME: Steven Paul Jobs BORN: February 24, 1955 DIED: October 5, 2011 BIRTHPLACE: San Francisco, California SPOUSE: Laurene Powell (1991-2011) CHILDREN: Lisa, Reed, Erin, and Eve ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Pisces

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption. As an infant, 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.

Jobs’ biological father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor. His biological mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Jobs was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

Jobs lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley. He was curious from childhood, sometimes to his detriment. According to the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Jobs was taken to the emergency room twice as a toddler—once after sticking a pin into an electrical socket and burning his hand, and another time because he had ingested poison. His mother Clara had taught him to read by the time he started kindergarten.

As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Although Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined.

While attending Homestead High School, Jobs joined the Explorer’s Club at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he saw a computer for the first time. He even picked up a summer job with HP after calling company cofounder Bill Hewlett to ask for parts for a frequency counter he was building. It was at HP that a teenaged Jobs met he met his future partner and cofounder of Apple Computer Steve Wozniak , who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he withdrew from college after six months and spent the next year and a half dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later, he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs’ family garage. Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his beloved scientific calculator to fund their entrepreneurial venture. Through Apple, the men are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive, and accessible to everyday consumers.

Wozniak conceived of 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 around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple’s second model, the Apple II, the company’s sales increased exponentially to $139 million.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its first day of trading. However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.

Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple in 1983. The next year, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM’s PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.

Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company’s executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he cofounded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and left Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs personally invested $12 million to begin a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT Inc. The company introduced its first computer in 1988, with Jobs hoping it would appeal to universities and researchers. But with a base price of $6,500, the machine was far out of the range of most potential buyers.

The company’s operating system NeXTSTEP fared better, with programmers using it to develop video games like Quake and Doom . Tim Berners-Lee, who created the first web browser, used an NeXT computer. However, the company struggled to appeal to mainstream America, and Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429 million.

In 1986, Jobs purchased 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 went on to produce wildly popular movies such as Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), and Up (2009) . Pixar merged with Disney in 2006, which made Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney. As of June 2022, Pixar films had collectively grossed $14.7 billion at the global box office.

In 1997, Jobs returned to his post as Apple’s CEO. Just as Jobs instigated Apple’s success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s.

With a new management team, altered stock options, and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. Jobs’ ingenious products like the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.

In the ensuing years, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod, and iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology. Almost immediately after Apple released a new product, competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies. To mark its expanded product offerings, the company officially rebranded as Apple Inc. in 2007.

Apple’s quarterly reports improved significantly that year: Stocks were worth $199.99 a share—a record-breaking number at that time—and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion profit, an $18 billion surplus in the bank, and zero debt.

In 2008, fueled by iTunes and iPod sales, Apple became the second-biggest music retailer in America behind Walmart. Apple has also been ranked No. 1 on Fortune ’s list of America’s Most Admired Companies, as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Apple has released dozens of versions of the iPhone since its 2007 debut. In February 2023, an unwrapped first generation phone sold at auction for more than $63,000.

According to Forbes , Jobs’ net worth peaked at $8.3 billion shortly before he died in 2011. Celebrity Net Worth estimates it was as high as $10.2 billion.

Apple hit a market capitalization of $3 trillion in January 2022, meaning Jobs’ initial stake in the company from 1980 would have been worth about $330 billion—enough to comfortably make him the richest person in the world over Tesla founder Elon Musk had he been alive. But according to the New York Post , Jobs sold off all but one of his Apple shares when he left the company in 1985.

Most of Jobs’ net worth came from a roughly 8 percent share in Disney he acquired when he sold Pixar in 2006. Based on Disney’s 2022 value, that share—which he passed onto his wife—is worth $22 billion.

Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto with their three children: Reed (born September 22, 1991), Erin (born August 19, 1995), and Eve (born July 9, 1998).

Jobs also fathered a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan on May 17, 1978, when he was 23. He denied paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile. In her memoir Small Fry , Lisa wrote DNA tests revealed that she and Jobs were a match in 1980, and he was required to begin making paternity payments to her financially struggling mother. Jobs didn’t initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father. In 2011, Jobs said , “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.”

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pesco-vegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options.

For nine months, Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple’s board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stock if word got out that the CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs’ confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure.

In 2004, Jobs had successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, Jobs disclosed little about his health in subsequent years.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs’ weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. Days later, he went on a six-month leave of absence.

In an email message to employees, Jobs said his “health-related issues are more complex” than he thought, then named Tim Cook , Apple’s then–chief operating officer, as “responsible for Apple’s day-today operations.”

After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event on September 9, 2009. He continued to serve as master of ceremonies, which included the unveiling of the iPad, throughout much of 2010.

In January 2011, Jobs announced he was going on medical leave. In August, he resigned as CEO of Apple, handing the reins to Cook.

Jobs died at age 56 in his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. His official cause of death was listed as respiratory arrest related to his years-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

The New York Times reported that in his final weeks, Jobs had become so weak that he struggled to walk up the stairs in his home. Still, he was able to say goodbye to some of his longtime colleagues, including Disney CEO Bob Iger; speak with his biographer; and offer advice to Apple executives about the unveiling of the iPhone 4S.

In a eulogy for Jobs , sister Mona Simpson wrote that just before dying, Jobs looked for a long time at his sister, Patty, then his wife and children, then past them, and said his last words: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

Jobs’ closest family and friends remembered him at a small gathering, then on October 16, a funeral for Jobs was held on the campus of Stanford University. Notable attendees included Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates ; singer Joan Baez , who once dated Jobs; former Vice President Al Gore ; actor Tim Allen; and News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch .

Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. Upon the release of the 2015 film Steve Jobs , fans traveled to the cemetery to find the site. Because the cemetery is not allowed to disclose the grave’s location, many left messages for Jobs in a memorial book instead.

Before his death, Jobs granted author and journalist Walter Isaacson permission to write his official biography. Jobs sat for more than 40 interviews with the Isaacson, who also talked to more than 100 of Jobs’ family, friends, and colleagues. Initially scheduled for a November 2011 release date, Steve Jobs hit shelves on October 24, just 19 days after Jobs died.

Jobs’ life has been the subject of two major films. The first, released in 2013, was simply titled Jobs and starred Ashton Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak told The Verge in 2013 he was approached about working on the film but couldn’t because, “I read a script as far as I could stomach it and felt it was crap.” Although he praised the casting, he told Gizmodo he felt his and Jobs’ personalities were inaccurately portrayed.

Instead, Wozniak worked with Sony Pictures on the second film, Steve Jobs , that was adapted from Isaacson’s biography and released in 2015. It starred Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Seth Rogen as Wozniak. Fassbender was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and co-star Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Apple and NeXT marketing executive Joanna Hoffman.

In 2015, filmmaker Alex Gibney examined Jobs’ life and legacy in the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine .

• Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world? [Jobs inviting an executive to join Apple]
• It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.
• In my perspective... science and computer science is a liberal art. It’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life.
• It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.
• There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love—‘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.
• You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
• I think humans are basically tool builders, and the computer is the most remarkable tool we’ve ever built.
• You just make the best product you can, and you don’t put it out until you feel it’s right.
• With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.
• Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
• I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates .
• If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
• Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful—that’s what matters to me.
• I like to believe there’s an afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn’t just disappear when you die, but somehow, it endures. But maybe it’s just like an on/off switch and click—and you’re gone. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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Steve jobs biography, tina fey memoir top amazon’s best-selling books of 2011.

Chelsea Handler, Rob Lowe and Steven Tyler also make the list of top 10 titles sold.

By Philiana Ng

Philiana Ng

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Steve Jobs Biography Cover - P 2011

Amazon announced its top 10 best-selling books overall of 2011 (including Kindle sales) and not surprisingly, Walter Isaacson ‘s Steve Jobs biography took the No. 1 spot after hitting bookshelves in late October following Jobs’ death.

Originally scheduled for publication in March 2012, the bio release was then moved up to late November 2011 due to Job’s declining health and actually debuted on Oct. 24. The Apple CEO and chairman personally selected Isaacson, the former Time editor and author of best-selling biographies of Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein, to write the only authorized take on his life.

Tina Fey ‘s Bossypants , released in April, was a close second with Jaycee Dugard ‘s A Stolen Life . In 1991, Dugard was abducted from a school bus stop and for the following 18 years, she was held captive by her kidnappers Philip Craig and Nancy Garrido, giving birth to two daughters.

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin’ s latest installment in the fantasy epic A Dance With Dragons, published in July, took the sixth spot.

Amazon’s best-selling books in print also include Chelsea Handler ‘s Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me , James A. Miller ‘s Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside the World of ESPN , Steven Tyler ‘s memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? , Rob Lowe ‘s Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Ellen DeGeneres ‘ Seriously … I’m Kidding , Mindy Kaling ‘s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns and the third RIchard Castle (a fictional character on ABC’s Castle) entitled Heat Rises.

“After the year of recommending books to our customers, it’s always fun to see what books really resonated with them,” said Chris Schluep , senior editor of books, Amazon.com. “We chose Steve Jobs as one of the Top 10 best books of the year, and even though it was published in October, the sales have been phenomenal in both formats.”

The top 10 best-selling books overall as follows:

• “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson
• “Bossypants” by Tina Fey
• “A Stolen Life” by Jaycee Dugard
• “The Mill River Recluse” by Darcie Chan
• “In the Garden of the Beasts” by Erik Larson
• “A Dance with Dragons” by George R.R. Martin
• “The Paris Wife” by Paula McLain
• “The Litigators” by John Grisham
• “The Abbey” by Chris Culver
• “Inheritance (The Inheritance Cycle)” by Christopher Paolini

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Read Bill Gates' answer to a Reddit question about whether he copied Steve Jobs

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs built two of the biggest names in technology today: Microsoft and Apple, respectively.

Both companies are considered pioneers in the industry, creating software and hardware that revolutionized how we live, communicate, and do business.

But it's no secret that the two moguls were more rivals than friends.

Though they had a somewhat amicable relationship early on, Jobs became furious when Microsoft released its first iteration of Windows in 1985, accusing Gates of ripping off his Macintosh computer. It started a competitive feud between the two that spurred years of back-and-forth insults. However, it was clear that the two men had mutual respect for each other. 

Related stories

During a recent Reddit AMA , or "ask me anything," one participant posed the following question to Gates, point-blank: "Did you copy Steve Jobs or did he copy you?"

Here's Gates' response :

"The main "copying" that went on relative to Steve and me is that we both benefited from the work that Xerox Parc did in creating graphical interface — it wasn't just them, but they did the best work. Steve hired Bob Belville, I hired Charles Simonyi. We didn't violate any IP rights Xerox had, but their work showed the way that led to the Mac and Windows."

It's not the first time Gates has said something of this nature.

Back when Jobs first accused Gates of ripping off his idea, the two met in a conference room at Apple, where Jobs ripped into Gates, yelling, "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"

As Walter Isaacson reported in his Steve Jobs biography, Gates responded : "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

Watch: Bill Gates has a net worth of over $96 billion — here's how he makes and spends his money

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The strange eating habits of Steve Jobs

No matter your opinion on the legacy of Steve Jobs, we can likely all agree on this: Dude had some unconventional health habits. The new  biography by Walter Isaacson details some of the weirder ones, from extremely restrictive diets to questionable personal hygiene. (A personal favorite: One of his go-to stress relievers during Apple's early days was soaking his bare feet in the company toilets.)

We asked some nutrition experts to weigh in on some of the stranger, stricter eating habits of the legendary tech tycoon.

Apples-and-carrots only diet

The book details his occasional tendency to eat only one or two foods, like carrots or apples, for weeks at a time . Besides developing a sunset-like hue -- which those who worked with him are quoted as remembering -- there are other health issues that can come from adhering to such a limited diet, says Elisa Zied , registered dietitian and msnbc.com contributor. 

"Although apples and carrots are healthful and provide carbohydrates, they have very little protein -- unlike fat and carbohydrates, protein can’t be stored in the body, so it’s important to consume enough protein rich foods each day," explains Zied, who's the author of the book, "Nutrition at Your Fingertips."

Protein provides the body with energy and structural support -- it also helps preserve lean muscle tissue that keeps your metabolism raring to go, and it supports muscle function. But if you don't take in enough protein, your body will miss out on essential amino acids, Zied says. "These essential amino acids are used to make body proteins ... that support growth and maintenance of body tissues."

Another drawback of a carrots- or apples-only diet: You aren't getting enough fat. 

"Without enough dietary fat, your body’s fat stores can become depleted," Zied explains. "Your skin may suffer, you may feel more cold more often, and your organs and body tissues may be more vulnerable against injury -- especially risky for those with chronic illness."

Flirting with fruitarianism

Jobs also spent some time as a fruitarian, a subset of veganism that means eating only fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetables and grains -- absolutely no animal products. "Basically, the reproductive parts of plants that can be consumed without doing any harm to the plant itself," TODAY nutritionist Joy Bauer explains. This kind of diet does contain some very healthy foods, and many vegans manage to keep extremely healthful diets. But experts caution that without a careful eating plan, essential nutrients may be missing. 

"This type of diet is extremely restrictive as it eliminates dairy foods ...  and probably doesn’t contain enough dietary fat unless you’re eating lots of nuts and seeds," Zied explains. "And because the foods you can eat (or beverages you can drink) are so limited, you only get the nutrients provided in the specific foods."

Plus, it's an expensive diet to adhere to for a long period of time, Bauer points out. 

Veganism and the tyranny of the daily shower

Jobs also believed that his commitment to vegan diets meant his body was flushed of mucus -- and that it meant he was free from body odor, so he didn't need to wear deodorant or shower regularly. Unsurprisingly, the book quotes former coworkers saying that he was very, very wrong. 

Actually, the lack of complete proteins in vegan-style diets might impede the body's detoxification process, which "could make him smell even more," says JJ Virgin, nutrition expert and co-star of TLC's "Freaky Eaters." As for mucus -- Jobs may have had a point there. Dietary changes can help reduce the goo, especially for those who produce excessive mucus because of illness.

The agony and the ecstasy of fasting

Jobs would sometimes turn to fasting to create feelings of euphoria and ecstasy. What he was most likely experiencing was something called ketosis, which develops after a period of fasting and can lead to mild euphoria. When you're eating normally, glucose is the body's primary energy source, Zied explains. But when you're fasting, your body creates small chemicals called ketones that act as a substitute for glucose, and can be used for energy by most body cells. 

"If your body makes more ketones than it needs to create energy, a dangerous condition called ketosis develops," Zied says. "This increases the loss of sodium and water from the body and can contribute to nausea, weakness, fatigue."

What do think of some of Jobs' more unusual eating habits? (And, hey -- keep it civil.) What's the weirdest diet you've ever tried?

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