The Story in Nine Chapters
Steve Jobs was given up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college after six months but kept auditing classes anyway, and co-founded Apple in a garage at twenty-one on the strength of a computer his best friend designed, not him. He built the personal-computer market, got pushed out of his own company at thirty, and spent a decade in the wilderness funding a money-losing animation studio that eventually became Pixar -- a bet that took ten years to pay off. He returned to a nearly bankrupt Apple in 1997, took a lifeline from his biggest rival, and over the next decade shipped the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, each one reshaping an entire industry. He was diagnosed with a rare, operable form of pancreatic cancer in 2003 and delayed the recommended surgery for nine months to pursue alternative treatments first -- a decision that still divides doctors on how much it mattered, and that he could not undo. He died in 2011 at fifty-six, having spent his last years turning his own mortality, like everything else, into a story he got to help tell.
The Kid Who Didn't Belong Anywhere
Steven Paul Jobs was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, and given up for adoption at birth by his biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born Abdulfattah "John" Jandali; he was raised by Paul and Clara Jobs in Mountain View and Los Altos, California, at the edge of what was about to become Silicon Valley. He enrolled at Reed College in Portland in the fall of 1972 and formally dropped out after about six months, unable to justify the tuition cost to his working-class adoptive parents -- but he stayed in Portland for another eighteen months anyway, unofficially auditing whatever classes interested him, including a calligraphy course he later said directly shaped the Macintosh's typography a decade later. He worked as a technician at Atari, traveled to India in 1974 on a spiritual search, and experimented with LSD, which he later called one of the two or three most important things he ever did. Reconnecting with an old friend, Steve Wozniak -- who had built a hobbyist computer board and was showing it off at the Homebrew Computer Club -- gave the wandering twenty-year-old the one thing he still lacked: something to build.
Two Steves in a Garage
Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976, alongside a third partner, Ronald Wayne, who sold his 10% stake back for $800 just twelve days later -- a stake that would eventually have been worth tens of billions. The company was funded, in the origin story Jobs told for the rest of his life, by selling his Volkswagen microbus and Wozniak selling his HP-65 scientific calculator. Wozniak alone designed and hand-built the Apple I, first demonstrated at the Homebrew Computer Club; Jobs's contribution was the idea of manufacturing and selling it as a finished product rather than a hobbyist kit, and the deal he struck to sell roughly fifty units to the Byte Shop in Mountain View at $666.66 each. The Apple II, launched June 10, 1977 at $1,298, was the real turning point: color graphics, a molded plastic case Jobs pushed hard for, and a design accessible to non-hobbyists for the first time. It, far more than the Apple I, is what created the home-computer market and Apple's first fortune.
The Machine That Was Supposed to Change Everything
Through the early 1980s Jobs led the small, fiercely design-obsessed team building the Macintosh, positioning it as a graphical, mouse-driven computer for ordinary people rather than hobbyists or engineers -- a direct bet against the command-line PCs that then dominated the market. The Mac launched in January 1984 with the now-legendary Ridley Scott-directed "1984" television commercial, aired during that year's Super Bowl exactly once, casting Apple as a lone rebel breaking IBM's conformist stranglehold on computing. In 1983, eager for an experienced business partner, Jobs personally recruited Pepsi-Cola president John Sculley to become Apple's CEO with a line that outlived the product itself: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" The Mac shipped to real enthusiasm but underwhelming early sales, and the tension between Jobs's uncompromising design instincts and the rest of Apple's management was about to come to a head.
Fired From His Own Company
The Macintosh's soft initial sales and a deepening power struggle between Jobs and the executives he himself had helped recruit came to a head in the spring of 1985. In April, the Apple board sided with CEO John Sculley and stripped Jobs of operational authority over the Macintosh division he had built and led for years. Rather than stay on in a diminished role, Jobs formally resigned from Apple on September 17, 1985, taking several senior employees with him to found a new company. He kept exactly one share of Apple stock, out of the 6.5 million he had held, specifically so he would keep receiving shareholder mailings and stay informed about the company he had co-founded and just been pushed out of, at twenty-nine years old, in full public view.
The Ten-Year Bet Nobody Else Would Have Made
Jobs founded NeXT Inc. in 1985; its striking black-cube NeXT Computer, released in 1988, was a commercial disappointment as hardware, but its object-oriented NeXTSTEP operating system quietly became the technical foundation Apple would later build Mac OS X, and eventually iOS, on top of. In 1986 Jobs bought the computer-graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million, renaming it Pixar -- for most of the following decade it was a struggling hardware company that happened to also make short animated films, and it lost money for years with no guarantee it would ever turn a profit. Pixar's gamble paid off catastrophically well in November 1995 with the release of Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated film in history, a critical and commercial triumph that validated a decade of unglamorous, unprofitable persistence. Disney's acquisition of Pixar, announced January 24, 2006, for $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal, made Jobs Disney's single largest individual shareholder at roughly 7% -- a return, on the original $10 million Lucasfilm purchase, that dwarfs almost everything he ever did at Apple in pure financial terms.
The Return
Apple announced its acquisition of NeXT on December 20, 1996, for roughly $400-429 million -- a deal driven by Apple's need for NeXTSTEP's modern operating-system technology, which quietly brought Jobs back into the company as an informal advisor. On July 9, 1997, Apple's board ousted CEO Gil Amelio; Jobs became interim CEO shortly after, a title he wouldn't formally drop until Macworld in January 2000. To stabilize a company that was weeks from insolvency, Jobs secured a pragmatic $150 million investment from Apple's fiercest rival, Microsoft, announced at Macworld Boston in August 1997 alongside a patent cross-licensing deal and a commitment to keep developing Mac Office -- a genuine truce of convenience, not a personal reconciliation with Bill Gates. Jobs also slashed Apple's sprawling, confusing product line down to a simple four-quadrant matrix of consumer and professional desktops and laptops, and launched the "Think Different" advertising campaign in 1997, reintroducing Apple's identity around the outsiders and misfits Jobs had always seen himself as one of.
Building the Machine That Loved You Back
The iMac, launched May 6, 1998 at $1,299, was the first major project of newly hired design chief Jony Ive and the first visible proof, in Jobs's first full year back, that Apple could still surprise people -- a translucent, egg-shaped, Bondi Blue all-in-one that looked like nothing else being sold as a computer. Jobs and Ive's partnership, which began before Jobs's return but was elevated by him afterward, became the creative engine behind nearly every major Apple product for the following decade. The iPod, announced October 23, 2001 and on sale by November 10 at $399, pitched itself simply as "1,000 songs in your pocket" on a 5GB drive; paired with iTunes and, by 2003, the iTunes Music Store selling songs for 99 cents each, it gave Apple its first genuinely new product category since the Macintosh and reshaped the music industry's relationship to digital distribution in the process.
Three Devices, One Device
Jobs unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld San Francisco on January 9, 2007, opening with "We're going to make some history together today" and framing the product as three things folded into one: "a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device." At the same keynote, Apple Computer, Inc. formally dropped "Computer" from its name to become simply Apple Inc., a quiet but deliberate acknowledgment that the company's future was no longer primarily about computers. Three years later, on January 27, 2010, Apple launched the iPad, pitched as an entirely new category of device sitting between a smartphone and a laptop for browsing, media, games, and books. Together the iPhone and iPad represented the commercial peak of the Jobs-era product run -- categories Apple didn't just enter but largely redefined for the rest of the industry to follow.
Borrowed Time
In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with an islet-cell neuroendocrine tumor of the pancreas -- a rare, slow-growing, and, per his doctors at the time, surgically curable form of pancreatic cancer, meaningfully different from the far more common and far more lethal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Against the urging of his family, friends, and doctors, he delayed the recommended surgery for approximately nine months, pursuing dietary changes, acupuncture, and other alternative treatments first, before undergoing surgery in 2004; medical opinion remains genuinely divided on how much that delay affected his ultimate prognosis, given how much more slowly this particular tumor type tends to progress. He received a liver transplant in 2009 in Memphis, Tennessee, took medical leaves of absence in 2009 and again in January 2011, and resigned as CEO on August 24, 2011, handing the role to Tim Cook. Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, at fifty-six; his sister Mona Simpson's public eulogy recounted his final words as "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." He left behind a legend already carefully shaped by his own hand -- and myths about his college years, his co-founder, his most famous ad campaign, and his signature turtleneck that outgrew the facts almost immediately.