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Book review: 'Steve Jobs' by Walter Isaacson

Review of walter isaacson's biography of steve jobs.

By Laura June

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Walter Isaacson’s biography of  Steve Jobs  is in some ways another product created from the mind of its subject. Though Jobs was insistent that he wouldn’t interfere with the writing of the book (and in fact he seems not to have read any part of it), he hand-picked Isaacson to lay down his legacy for all to see. Why he chose him is not surprising: Isaacson’s biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein are engrossing, epic, and readable studies of men who changed history. That Steve Jobs saw himself in this light (and such august company) is neither shocking nor unjustified. And while Isaacson never shies away from Jobs’s often vitriolic temper (and indeed he sometimes seems to dwell on it to make his point), it is clear that in some respects, Steve Jobs is a book told through the often discussed "reality distortion field" of Steve Jobs himself: though other opinions or sides to a story are presented, Steve always has the last, blunt word.

Given the unprecedented access to Jobs and his blessing to interview those close to him presents the reader with a vast and exceedingly complex — but also incredibly consistent — portrait of the man who created Apple and some of the most important technology products of this century. In many ways, the Jobs of the early ’80s at the outset of his breathtaking career is the same feisty and impetuous man we find at the end of the book, picking apart his plans to build a yacht that he knew he would likely never see to completion. Jobs, at least according to this tale, didn’t evolve so much as he forced the world around him to do so. Isaacson’s mastery of the form is evident throughout, and he weaves the tale of Jobs’s life deftly.

For technology enthusiasts and those who followed Steve Jobs’s life as though he were Bob Dylan, the biography reinforces the previously known timeline. Jobs’s own admission early in the process with Isaacson that he didn’t "have any skeletons" in his "closet that can’t be allowed out" is largely true (Isaacson, xx). There are no shocking revelations, but the nuance brought to the events by the wide array of characters Isaacson spent time with, and Jobs’s candid and original perspective, never fail to bring well-known events into sharp and personal focus. One example which was well-documented in the media at the time and which gets several pages of attention in the book is the issue of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems. The story, as told in the book, is significant for a few reasons. First, the book reveals that the band of steel around the edge of the phone was never a big hit with Apple’s engineers, who warned that it could cause reception problems. But Apple’s SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs, living deep in the "reality distortion field" which is repeatedly referred to in the book (and which Jobs’s wife more strikingly terms "magical thinking") insisted that the engineers could figure out how to make it work, to the point that they (Ive and Jobs) even resisted putting a clear coating of varnish on the band to make problems less likely. Secondly, when problems did, in fact, arise, the book makes clear how personally Jobs took the entire situation, going so far as to adamantly suggest that Apple simply ignore the issue, because in his mind, there was no problem, saying, "Fuck this, it’s not worth it" (Isaacson, 521). Only when Tim Cook implored him to face facts did Jobs decide to hold a press conference and offer solutions.

Likewise, it is almost amusing and even a bit sad to read of Jobs’s depression and anger on the evening following the debut of the iPad. Isaacson was by then, somewhat embedded in the Jobs household, and he notes that "as we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone." Jobs told him, "I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, ‘Fuck you, how can you do that?’ I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, ‘Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.’ And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit" (Isaacon, 495). In this and every previous or future launch, Jobs took the products, and their reception, very personally. In every phase of development, from inception to advertisements, he was a dictator, and, as the book underlines quite clearly, people who reacted badly or were underwhelmed simply didn’t get it. The book is rife with such personal perspectives of what are hallowed occurrences in the timeline of Jobs and Apple.

Jobs’s many achievements are tallied in detail, and while they are well known — the Macintosh, Pixar, the iMac, the iPhone, the iPad — it has only been previously assumed that Jobs was closely involved. Now all of his interactions with Apple’s products are truly exposed, in great, painstaking detail. That Jobs was exhaustively involved from beginning to end in the creation of these products and companies — even during the years in which he was gravely ill — is a testament to his work ethic, his creativity, and his genius. While Steve Jobs never shies away from turning a critical eye on its subject, it rightfully gives much credit to Jobs where it is due. People have long pointed out that Jobs could be an "asshole," and while the book never outright denies such a description, the sheer volume of his achievements and creations often puts the erratic and childish behavior into soft focus. In fact, the book seems to suggest that Jobs’s fantastic career was born out of his harsh, demanding attitude, rather than in spite of it. "I don’t think I run roughshod over people," Jobs told Isaacson, "but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same" (Isaacson, 568-569). Rather than exposing Jobs an "asshole," the biography presents, front to back, a human being who was essentially incapable of being phony, even if doing so would make him appear better to others.

The book also emphasizes, in anecdotes that probably aren’t totally surprising, Jobs’s belief, from the beginning of his career to the end of it, that everything should be (and was if possible), in his control. This meant not just making hardware and software into a closed ecosystem, but also controlling what could be done with the actual products once purchased. The stubborn surety that he knew what was right for himself and everyone else famously resulted in Macs and iPhones which were hard to open up and hack (even adding special screws to the latter to make it more difficult), and in the fact that the iPad wouldn’t display Flash. It also resulted, however, in Jobs stubbornly and often refusing to eat (even when sick), in a belief that being vegan meant he didn’t have to shower, and in a resistance to allow his doctors to remove the cancerous tumor on his colon for nine months in 2003.

Jobs’s managerial style (or lack of one), had been previously well-documented after his ouster from Apple, but the biography is probably at its harshest when describing his various working relationships with other people. We are presented with personal accounts of a well-known volatility that is increasingly shocking, sometimes delusional, and always, in the mind of its subject, justified. One of the true revelations of the book is that Steve Jobs cried — a lot, and in the presence of his co-workers. From the earliest days of his career when he cried to Steve Wozniak’s father Jerry about getting Woz to come work at Apple full time, he broke down in tears regularly when frustrated, when cornered, when happy or touched, and when angry. Though his return to Apple did seem to bring some temperance and evenness to his management efforts, Jobs never stopped openly crying when emotion overwhelmed him.

The sections where  Bill Gates  — who was sometimes an insider and sometimes not — weighs in, are variously the most touching, sometimes the most interesting, and often do the most to underline the great chasm of difference there was between the two personalities. While Jobs avoids branding him with his favorite and oft-used title "bozo," Gates, in this tale, truly doesn’t get it a lot of the time, but he gets that he doesn’t get it. On the success of the iPad, Gates tells Isaacson, "Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and Steve is still coming up with amazing new products," adding, "Maybe I should have stayed in that game" (Isaacson, 553).

Throughout the book, Jobs is incredibly and sometimes amusingly cutting about various friends, former colleagues, business associates, and even celebrities. Many people, in his view (including but not limited to John Mayer, President Obama, Google, and Rupert Murdoch) were constantly "blowing it." He makes it clear that grudges held could often be permanent. When speaking of Jon Rubinstein, a former Apple executive who helped give birth to the iPod and was then head of Palm, Jobs admits to having emailed Bono, a Palm investor, to complain when the company began trying to make an iPhone competitor. Bono replied that his remarks were akin to "the Beatles ringing up because Herman and the Hermits have taken one of their road crew" (Isaacson, 459). "The fact that they [Palm] completely failed salves that wound," Jobs says (Isaacson, 460).

Jobs perspective that certain things "sucked" could often be influenced by other factors. For example, it’s hard to tell if Jobs truly thought that Android is "crap," or if he says it because he was involved in a lengthy battle against Google over patent infringement. What emerges from the Android discussion, however, is that Jobs passionately believed that it was a stolen product. Isaacson was with Jobs the week Apple filed its lawsuit against Google, when Jobs was the "angriest he’d ever seen him."

"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 going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products — Android, Google Docs — are shit" (Isaacson, 511-512). In fact, there are few people and companies Jobs sets his sights on who don’t fail to cut the mustard on many levels. Notable exceptions are the Beatles (who Jobs talks about at length in one of the most insightful sections of the book), his wife Laurene, and Jony Ive.

Though none of the Beatles weigh in on Jobs, both Laurene and Ive do, and Ive in particular seems to grapple with Jobs’s personality, telling Isaacson "He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that make his antisocial behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable" (Isaacson, 462). Ive is significant to the book in other ways, as Jobs’s main creative brother-in-arms, and, as the story progresses, it is clear that both men struggled with the idea of a post-Jobs Apple. For nearly the entire latter half of the book, and much of Jobs’s "phase two" at Apple, his health was a near constant concern for those closest to him, and Ive was in that inner-circle. When Jobs returned from a two-month stay in Memphis in May 2009 following his liver transplant, Ive and Cook were there to meet him and his wife on the tarmac. Both Ive and Jobs reported feeling the same way — Ive was "devastated" and "underappreciated" by media stories questioning the ability of  Apple to innovate without Jobs , while Jobs was somewhat miffed at Cook’s earnings report call where he suggested that Apple could do just that. "He didn’t know whether to be proud or hurt that it might be true," Issacson writes. "There was talk that he might step aside and become chairman rather than CEO. That made him all the more motivated to get out of his bed, overcome the pain, and start taking his restorative walks again" (Isaacson, 488). The book thus is oddly positioned in that its subject, near the end of the story, is well aware that he is very likely near the end of his career, and indeed, he tells Isaacson on their last meeting, "I’ve done all that I can do" (Isaacson, 559).

In that respect, Jobs the man is consistent throughout, expressing little regret or dissatisfaction with himself, except for his repeated wish that he had spent more time with his children, who, he says, were his main motivation for cooperating with and encouraging that a biography be written at all. In a world where people and media will pay actual money for one glimpse of a dying and frail CEO, Steve Jobs will not be the final book on the man, but it will be the only one told largely in his words, and the only one in which he had the final say on its cover. All the other books will no doubt be written by bozos who blow it.

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Books of The Times

Making the iBio for Apple’s Genius

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By Janet Maslin

• Oct. 21, 2011

After Steve Jobs anointed Walter Isaacson as his authorized biographer in 2009, he took Mr. Isaacson to see the Mountain View, Calif., house in which he had lived as a boy. He pointed out its “clean design” and “awesome little features.” He praised the developer, Joseph Eichler, who built more than 11,000 homes in California subdivisions, for making an affordable product on a mass-market scale. And he showed Mr. Isaacson the stockade fence built 50 years earlier by his father, Paul Jobs.

“He loved doing things right,” Mr. Jobs said. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

Mr. Jobs, the brilliant and protean creator whose inventions so utterly transformed the allure of technology, turned those childhood lessons into an all-purpose theory of intelligent design. He gave Mr. Isaacson a chance to play by the same rules. His story calls for a book that is clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio. Mr. Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” does its solid best to hit that target.

As a biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin , Mr. Isaacson knows how to explicate and celebrate genius: revered, long-dead genius. But he wrote “Steve Jobs” as its subject was mortally ill, and that is a more painful and delicate challenge. (He had access to members of the Jobs family at a difficult time.) Mr. Jobs promised not to look over Mr. Isaacson’s shoulder, and not to meddle with anything but the book’s cover. (Boy, does it look great.) And he expressed approval that the book would not be entirely flattering. But his legacy was at stake. And there were awkward questions to be asked. At the end of the volume, Mr. Jobs answers the question “What drove me?” by discussing himself in the past tense.

Mr. Isaacson treats “Steve Jobs” as the biography of record, which means that it is a strange book to read so soon after its subject’s death. Some of it is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint. Mr. Jobs’s first job was at Atari, and it involved the game Pong. (“If you’re under 30, ask your parents,” Mr. Isaacson writes.) Some, like an account of the release of the iPad 2, is so recent that it is hard to appreciate yet, even if Mr. Isaacson says the device comes to life “like the face of a tickled baby.” 

And some is definitely intended for future generations. “Indeed,” Mr. Isaacson writes, “its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of delightful activities.” One that he mentions, which will be as quaint as Pong some day, features the use of a slingshot to launch angry birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses.

So “Steve Jobs,” an account of its subject’s 56 years (he died on Oct. 5), must reach across time in more ways than one. And it does, in a well-ordered, if not streamlined, fashion. It begins with a portrait of the young Mr. Jobs, rebellious toward the parents who raised him and scornful of the ones who gave him up for adoption. (“They were my sperm and egg bank,” he says.)

Although Mr. Isaacson is not analytical about his subject’s volatile personality (the word “obnoxious” figures in the book frequently), he raises the question of whether feelings of abandonment in childhood made him fanatically controlling and manipulative as an adult. Fortunately, that glib question stays unanswered.

Mr. Jobs, who founded Apple with Stephen Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, began his career as a seemingly contradictory blend of hippie truth seeker and tech-savvy hothead.

“His Zen awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind or interpersonal mellowness,” Mr. Isaacson says. “He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed,” he also writes. But Mr. Jobs valued simplicity, utility and beauty in ways that would shape his creative imagination. And the book maintains that those goals would not have been achievable in the great parade of Apple creations without that mean streak.

Mr. Isaacson takes his readers back to the time when laptops, desktops and windows were metaphors, not everyday realities. His book ticks off how each of the Apple innovations that we now take for granted first occurred to Mr. Jobs or his creative team. “Steve Jobs” means to be the authoritative book about those achievements, and it also follows Mr. Jobs into the wilderness (and to NeXT and Pixar) after his first stint at Apple, which ended in 1985.

With an avid interest in corporate intrigue, it skewers Mr. Jobs’s rivals, like John Sculley, who was recruited in 1983 to be Apple’s chief executive and fell for Mr. Jobs’s deceptive show of friendship. “They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display,” Mr. Isaacson writes.

Of course the book also tracks Mr. Jobs’s long and combative rivalry with Bill Gates. The section devoted to Mr. Jobs’s illness, which suggests that his cancer might have been more treatable had he not resisted early surgery, describes the relative tenderness of their last meeting.

“Steve Jobs” greatly admires its subject. But its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering. Here is an encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it deserves.

Mr. Jobs’s virtual reinvention of the music business with iTunes and the iPod, for instance, is made to seem all the more miraculous (“He’s got a turn-key solution,” the music executive Jimmy Iovine said.) Mr. Isaacson’s long view basically puts Mr. Jobs up there with Franklin and Einstein, even if a tiny MP3 player is not quite the theory of relativity. The book emphasizes how deceptively effortless Mr. Jobs’s ideas now seem because of their extreme intuitiveness and foresight. When Mr. Jobs, who personally persuaded musician after musician to accept the iTunes model, approached Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Marsalis was rightly more impressed with Mr. Jobs than with the device he was being shown.

Mr. Jobs’s love of music plays a big role in “Steve Jobs,” like his extreme obsession with Bob Dylan. (Like Mr. Dylan, he had a romance with Joan Baez. Her version of Mr. Dylan’s “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” was on Mr. Jobs’s own iPod.) So does his extraordinary way of perceiving ordinary things, like well-made knives and kitchen appliances. That he admired the Cuisinart food processor he saw at Macy’s may sound trivial, but his subsequent idea that a molded plastic covering might work well on a computer does not. Years from now, the research trip to a jelly bean factory to study potential colors for the iMac case will not seem as silly as it might now.

Skeptic after skeptic made the mistake of underrating Steve Jobs, and Mr. Isaacson records the howlers who misjudged an unrivaled career. “Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” Business Week wrote in a 2001 headline. “The iPod will likely become a niche product,” a Harvard Business School professor said. “High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product,” Mr. Sculley said in 1987.

Mr. Jobs got the last laugh every time. “Steve Jobs” makes it all the sadder that his last laugh is over.

By Walter Isaacson

Illustrated. 630 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.

The Books of The Times review on Saturday, about “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson, described Angry Birds, a popular iPhone game, incorrectly. Slingshots are used to launch birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses, not to shoot down the birds.

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Review of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

26 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by Steve in Business

≈ 2 Comments

Apple Computer , biographies , book reviews , Pulitzer Prize nominee , Steve Jobs , Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson’s “ Steve Jobs ” was published in the fall of 2011, three weeks after Jobs died at the age of 56. Isaacson is an author, journalist and former CEO of the Aspen Institute.  He has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin , Albert Einstein and Henry Kissinger (a book for which he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination).  His most recent biography “ Leonardo da Vinci ” was published in 2017.

“Steve Jobs” is an authorized biography of its idiosyncratic and complex subject. Isaacson received significant assistance from Jobs during his final years of life (primarily in the form of interviews and access to family photographs) but also from more than 100 of his family, friends, colleagues and competitors. But, so far as I can tell, Jobs never reviewed the book in draft form and did not live to see it published.

Far from being a hagiographic tribute to Jobs, though, Isaacson’s biography strips bare the multifaceted founder of Apple Computer. And Jobs quickly proves a perfect biographical subject: he is at once brilliant, narcissistic, intuitive, controlling, idiosyncratic and, occasionally, astonishingly cruel. The author fully dissects his persona – genius and flaws – with considerable skill.

Isaacson’s literary style lacks the erudite sophistication exhibited by some biographies, but his narrative – which often feels oddly informal – is accessible by anyone. And rather than creating an intricate or complicated story, Isaacson glues together hundreds of snippets, anecdotes, quotes and short stories from Jobs’s life to form a fluid, engrossing narrative devoid of unnecessary details or tangents.

The 571 pages of text are almost continually entertaining, engaging and utterly revealing. There are countless enjoyable chapters and passages including many which explore his personal life. But the heart of the book follows Jobs through his eventful two-part career at Apple. Hardcore technology enthusiasts may find Isaacson’s understanding (or explanation) of technology issues too simplistic, but for most readers the level sophistication is appropriate.

Unfortunately, while Isaacson does an admirable job uncovering Job’s maddening contradictions, he is less tenacious about fully unraveling them. As a result, readers never quite know what to think of an allegedly anti-materialistic “hippie” who shunned furniture and frequently greeted clients while barefoot…but drove a Porsche and owned a yacht.

In addition, Isaacson’s writing can be uneven – it occasionally proves deeply insightful and analytical but, more often, seems a bit breezy and carefree. At its core, however, this biography is a fascinating and well-organized collection of titillating tales which reveals his eccentricities but can never quite diagnose what makes Jobs tick . It is possible, of course, that the forces which drove Jobs are simply impenetrable.

Overall, Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” proves an interesting and well-balanced review of the life of one of the greatest (and most inscrutable) entrepreneurs of this generation. While Isaacson’s biography cannot fully explain Jobs’s curious contradictions it is extremely successful in highlighting his faults, flaws and quirks as well as his extraordinary genius through a free-flowing and engaging narrative.

Overall rating: 4 stars

2 thoughts on “Review of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson”

July 18, 2019 at 9:54 am

This was one of the easiest to follow biographies I have ever read, similar to reading a magazine profile (an extremely lengthy one). It was also, quite simply, an enjoyable book.

As you said, Isaacson did a very good job covering the complex and hypocritical character that was Steve Jobs. His writing brought the man alive in my head which is a key component in any biography (the ability to pull up the video clips mentioned also helps with this). The main drawback is that Isaacson was unable to adequately insert his own analysis of Jobs and Jobs’ evolution throughout the text. I think this would have been particularly relevant in the chapters featuring his time at NeXT where he overcame significant failures and flipped them into a triumphant return to Apple.

Overall, this is a fantastic book for anyone, especially those interested in the computer industry, Apple or Steve Jobs himself and I would highly recommend it. However, those who do heavier hitting material should know that this is a work geared towards the mass-market, which is probably the way Jobs would want it to be.

July 18, 2019 at 9:59 am

Couldn’t have said it better myself. And my experience with Isaacson’s bio of Jobs leaves me really looking forward to his biography of Einstein which is currently on my schedule for the Sept/Oct timeframe. And at some point thereafter I’ll be reading his biography of Ben Franklin…

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16 books Steve Jobs always turned to for inspiration

• Steve Jobs' lifelong interest in the humanities gave Apple a human touch.
• Some of the CEO's favorite books included "Moby Dick" and the poems of Dylan Thomas.
• Here are 16 books that inspired Steve Jobs.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Wednesday marks what would have been the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' 66th birthday. And while Tim Cook has since taken the reins, Jobs' legacy in modern technology lives on. 

Much of Jobs' vision for Apple stems from his lifelong interest in the humanities, which gave the company a human touch. As Jobs said while introducing the iPad , Apple was never just a tech company. 

"The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts," he said .

By combining these, Jobs said that Apple was able "to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users." 

Jobs arrived at that perspective through a lifetime of reading, as reviewed in Walter Isaacson's biography and other places . We've put together a list of 16 books that most inspired him. 

Steve Jobs fell in love with 'King Lear' by William Shakespeare in his final years of high school.

Jobs really found his literary bent in the last two years of high school. 

"I started to listen to music a whole lot," he told Isaacson , "and I started to read more outside of just science and technology — Shakespeare, Plato. I loved 'King Lear.'" 

The tragedy may have provided a cautionary tale to a young Jobs, since it's the story of an aged monarch going crazy trying to divide up his kingdom. 

"'King Lear' offers a vivid depiction of what can go wrong if you lose your grip on your empire, a story surely fascinating to any aspiring CEO," says Daniel Smith, author of "How to Think Like Steve Jobs."  

Buy it here »

The CEO also enjoyed 'Moby Dick' by Herman Melville during his adolescence.

Another epic story colored Jobs' outlook in his adolescence: "Moby Dick," the deeply American novel by Herman Melville. 

Isaacson draws a connection between Captain Ahab, who's one of the most driven and willful characters in literature, and Jobs. 

Ahab, like Jobs, did lots of his learning from direct experience, rather than relying on institutions. 

"I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling," the captain writes early in the story , "for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."

'The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas' drew in Jobs for its popularity and creativity.

But the intellectual flowering that Jobs had in late high school wasn't confined to hard-charging megalomaniacs — he also discovered a love for verse, particularly Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. 

"How To Think Like Steve Jobs" author Daniel Smith says that Thomas' poems "drew him in with its striking new forms and unerringly popular touch."

"Do not go gentle into that good night" became a reported favorite :  

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

'Be Here Now' by Ram Dass reportedly transformed Jobs when he was in college.

In late 1972, Jobs had just started at Reed College, an elite liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. He started taking LSD and reading lots of books about spirituality. 

"Be Here Now," a guide to meditation by Ram Dass, affected Jobs greatly. Born Richard Alpert, Dass offers an account of his  encounters with South Asian metaphysics : 

Now, though I am a beginner on the path, I have returned to the West for a time to work out karma or unfulfilled commitment. Part of this commitment is to share what I have learned with those of you who are on a similar journey ... Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.

For me, this story is but a vehicle for sharing with you the true message, the living faith in what is possible.

"It was profound," Jobs said . "It transformed me and many of my friends."

Jobs swore off meat after reading 'Diet for a Small Planet' by Frances Moore Lappe.

In that first year at Reed, Jobs also read "Diet for a Small Planet," a book about protein-rich vegetarianism that went on to sell 3 million copies. 

It was a breakthrough. 

"That's when I pretty much swore off meat for good," Jobs told Isaacson.

The book had another effect on Jobs: it gave him permission to experiment with extreme diets like purging or fasting.

Jobs stared juice fasting after reading 'Mucusless Diet Healing System' by Arnold Ehret .

But Jobs' diet grew more adventurous after reading "Muscusless Diet Healing System" by early-20th-century German dietitian Arnold Ehret, who recommended practices like " intermittent juice fasting ." 

"I got into it in my typical nutso way,"  Jobs told Isaacson .

After getting to know Ehret's work, Jobs became something of a nutritional extremist, subsisting on carrots for weeks at a time — to the point that his skin reportedly started turning orange.

But don't try this at home: Ashton Kutcher tried the all-fruit diet while prepping for his role as Steve Jobs, and  it landed him in the hospital .

Jobs read 'Autobiography of a Yogi' by Paramahansa Yogananda in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Jobs read "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda when he was in high school. 

Then he reread it while he stayed at a guesthouse in the foothills of the Himalayas in India .

Jobs explained :

There was a copy there of "Autobiography of a Yogi" in English that a previous traveler had left, and I read it several times, because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from village to village and recovered from my dysentery.

Unlike the sickness, the book remained a major part of Jobs' life. He reread it every year.

Jobs and Daniel Kottke got into Beat Generation literature before their trip to India.

Jobs and his best friend at the time, Daniel Kottke, read "On the Road" in the two-year period leading up to their India trip. 

Published in 1957, "On the Road" is a classic read of the Beat Generation, a literary movement exploring American politics and culture after World War II. The novel centers around Kerouac's travels across North America and Mexico with his friend, Neal Cassidy.

It's a well-known read about freedom, humanity, and self-discovery, and was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library. 

Jobs read 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind' by Shunryu Suzuki, and attended classes led by the author.

After Jobs got back from India, his interest in meditation continued to flourish. This is partly thanks to geography (1970s California was the place where Zen Buddhism got its first foothold in America), and Jobs was able to attend classes led by Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who authored "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." 

Like everything else, Jobs went hard into Zen. 

"He became really serious and self-important and just generally unbearable," Kottke said .

"Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since," Jobs told Isaacson . "At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual adviser urged me to stay here (in California)." 

'The Innovator's Dilemma' by Clayton M. Christensen taught Jobs how not to get left behind by technology.

Apple made a habit of disrupting itself. The iPhone, for instance, had lots of the features of the iconic iPod, thus rendering the music device obsolete. 

Jobs was able to see that that cannibalism was a necessary part of growth, thanks to the "Innovator's Dilemma" by legendary Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen.

The book posits that companies get ruined by their own success, staying committed to a product even after technology (and customers) move on, like Blockbuster did with physical movie rentals.

Jobs made it clear that the same thing wouldn't happen to Apple, as he said in his explanation of why it needed to embrace cloud computing : 

It's important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls "the innovator's dilemma," where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don't want to be left behind. 

Read more on Christensen .

'Cosmic Consciousness' by Richard Maurice Bucke inspired Jobs to travel across the globe.

Kottke recently shared a list of the books he and Jobs read around their time at Reed — ones that inspired Jobs' travels across the globe as well as his professional pursuits.

One of the most influential works on that list is "Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind," originally published by a Canadian psychiatrist in 1901.

Based on his own supposed experiences with enlightenment, Bucke makes the case for a higher form of consciousness than the normal person possesses. He outlines three forms of consciousness: the simple consciousness of animals and humans; the self-consciousness of humans, which includes reason and imagination; and cosmic consciousness, which transcends factual understanding.

You can read the full text online .

Jobs read 'The Way of the White Clouds' by Lama Anagarika Govinda as he started to explore Buddhism.

Buddhism was a tremendous influence in Jobs' life , and it's said that Zen philosophy helped inspire the simplistic design of Apple products.

Around the time they were beginning to explore Buddhism, Kottke said he and Jobs read this spiritual autobiography by a Buddhist who was one of the last foreigners to travel through Tibet before the Chinese invasion of 1950. Here the author recounts his experiences learning about Tibetan culture and tradition.

Jobs read 'Ramakrishna and his Disciples' by Christopher Isherwood as part of his literary exploration.

Kottke and Jobs' literary exploration also included this biography of the 19th-century Hindu saint Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, originally published in 1965.

Fans of the book say Isherwood refrains from preaching and from passing judgment on Ramakrishna's teachings. Instead, he helps readers understand how the saint became so widely influential and revered by taking them on a journey from Ramakrishna's childhood through his spiritual education.

'Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism' by Chogyam Trungpa taught Jobs that sense of self is an illusion.

This book was among those that Kottke and Jobs read while exploring Buddhist religion and philosophy.

It's a transcript of two lectures the author gave, between 1970 and 1971, on common traps in spiritual journeys.

The main idea is that the ego, or the sense of self, is only an illusion. Instead of trying to improve themselves through spirituality, Trungpa urges readers to just let themselves exist .

You can read the full text here .

Jobs read 'Meetings With Remarkable Men' by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, another book about a spiritual journey.

On their personal spiritual journeys, Jobs and Kottke derived inspiration from others who had embarked on similar quests for knowledge.

The second volume of the All and Everything trilogy , originally published in 1963, features the author's recounting of people he met during his travels across Central Asia.

Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher, sought spiritual and existential fulfillment in everyone from his father to a Persian dervish. One reader compares the work to a 20th-century version of the allegory " Pilgrim's Progress ."

In 1979, the book was adapted into a film by the same name.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak believes 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand was one of Steve Jobs' "guides in life."

Ayn Rand's 1957 book "Atlas Shrugged" is an action-thriller based on economics, philosophy, and science fiction.

The book details the journey of an industrialist and a railroad executive who are determined to keep the country afloat amid an economic crisis. The businessmen were also tasked with solving a range of mysteries that confronted them.

In 2011, Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak told Bloomberg the book inspired his late business partner, Steve Jobs. 

"Steve was very fast thinking and wanted to do things, I wanted to build things," Wozniak said. "I think 'Atlas Shrugged' was one of his guides in life." 

Buy it here.» 

Tat Bellamy Walker and Drake Baer contributed to a previous version of this article.

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Nine books that Steve Jobs thought everyone should read

Steve Jobs arrived at that perspective through a lifetime of reading, as reviewed in Walter Isaacson's biography and other places. We've put together a list of the books that most affected him

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Why did Apple think different?

Because, Steve Jobs said while introducing the iPad , the Mac maker was never just a tech company.

Nine books that Steve Jobs thought everyone should read Back to video

“The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts,” he said .

Jobs’ lifelong interest in the humanities gave Apple a human touch.

By combining tech and the liberal arts, Jobs said that Apple was able to “to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users.”

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Jobs arrived at that perspective through a lifetime of reading, as reviewed in Walter Isaacson’s biography and other places . We’ve put together a list of the books that most affected him.

‘King Lear’ by William Shakespeare

Jobs really began his literary bent in the last two years of high school.  

“I started to listen to music a whole lot,” he tells Isaacson , “and I started to read more outside of just science and technology — Shakespeare, Plato. I loved ‘King Lear.'”

The tragedy may have provided a cautionary tale to a young Jobs, since it’s the story of an aged monarch going crazy trying to divide up his kingdom.

“‘King Lear’ offers a vivid depiction of what can go wrong if you lose your grip on your empire, a story surely fascinating to any aspiring CEO,” says Daniel Smith, author of “How to Think Like Steve Jobs.”

Buy it here >>

‘moby dick’ by herman melville.

Another epic story colored Jobs’ outlook in his adolescence: “Moby Dick,” the deeply American novel by Herman Melville.

Isaacson draws a connection between Captain Ahab, who’s one of the most driven and willful characters in literature, and Jobs.

Ahab, like Jobs, did lots of his learning from direct experience, rather than relying on institutions.

“I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling,” the captain writes early in the story , “for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

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‘The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas’ by Dylan Thomas

But the intellectual flowering that Jobs had in late high school wasn’t confined to hard-charging megalomaniacs — he also discovered a love for verse, particularly Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

“How To Think Like Steve Jobs” author Daniel Smith says that Thomas’ poems “drew him in with its striking new forms and unerringly popular touch.”

“Do not go gentle” became a reported favorite :

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

‘Be Here Now’ by Ram Dass

In late 1972, Jobs had just started at Reed College, an elite liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. He started doing lots of LSD and reading lots of books about spirituality.

“Be Here Now,” a guide to meditation by Ram Dass, affected Jobs greatly. Born Richard Alpert, the book is an account of Dass’  encounters with South Asian metaphysics :

Now, though I am a beginner on the path, I have returned to the West for a time to work out karma or unfulfilled commitment. Part of this commitment is to share what I have learned with those of you who are on a similar journey … Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.

For me, this story is but a vehicle for sharing with you the true message, the living faith in what is possible.

“It was profound,” Jobs said. “It transformed me and many of my friends.”

‘Diet for a Small Planet’ by Frances Moore Lappe

In that first year at Reed, Jobs also read “Diet for a Small Planet,” a book about protein-rich vegetarianism that went on to sell three million copies.

It was a breakthrough.

“That’s when I pretty much swore off meat for good,” Jobs told Isaacson.

The book had another effect on Jobs — it gave him permission to experiment with extreme diets like purging or fasting.

Buy it here >>  

‘mucusless diet healing system’ by arnold ehret.

But Jobs’ diet grew more adventurous after reading “Mucusless Diet Healing System” by early 20th-century German dietitian Arnold Ehret, a guy who recommends practices like “ intermittent juice fasting .”

“I got into it in my typical nutso way,”  Jobs tells Isaacson .

After getting to know Ehret’s work, Jobs became something of a nutritional extremist, subsisting on carrots for weeks at a time — to the point that his skin reportedly started turning orange.

But don’t try this at home: Ashton Kutcher tried the all-fruit diet while prepping for his role as Steve Jobs, and  it landed him in the hospital .

‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ by Paramahansa Yogananda

Jobs read “Autobiography of a Yogi” by Indian yoga guru Paramahansa Yogananda when he was in high school.

Then he reread it while he stayed at a guesthouse in the foothills of the Himalayas in India .

Jobs explained :

There was a copy there of “Autobiography of a Yogi” in English that a previous traveler had left, and I read it several times, because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around the village to village and recovered from my dysentery.

Unlike the sickness, the book remained a major part of Jobs’ life. He reread it every year.

‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’ by Shunryu Suzuki

After Jobs got back from India his interest in meditation continued to flourish. This is partly thanks to geography — 1970s California was the place where Zen Buddhism got its first foothold in America, and Jobs was able to attend classes led by Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who authored “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.”

Like everything else, Jobs went hard into Zen.

“He became really serious and self-important and just generally unbearable,” says Daniel Kottke, his best friend at the time .

“Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since,” Jobs told Isaacson . “At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual advisor urged me to stay here (in California).”

‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ by Clayton M. Christensen

Apple made a habit of disrupting itself. The iPhone, for instance, had lots of the features of the iconic iPod, thus rendering the music device obsolete.

Jobs was able to see that that cannibalism was a necessary part of growth, thanks to the “Innovator’s Dilemma” by legendary Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen.

The book posits that companies get ruined by their own success, staying committed to a product even after technology (and customers) move on, like Blockbuster did with physical movie rentals.

Jobs made it clear that the same thing wouldn’t happen to Apple, as he said in his explanation of why it needed to embrace cloud computing :

It’s imporant that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be left behind.

For more on Christensen, go here .

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The Steve Jobs Reading List: The Books And Artists That Made The Man

Executive Tech Editor, The Huffington Post

"I like living at the intersection of the humanities and technology," Steve Jobs said once.

LSD, Bauhaus and Zen Buddhism shaped Apple's pioneering products as much as anything that took place on the assembly lines. They were among Jobs' greatest influences and they shaped his attitudes toward design, business and innovation.

The books Jobs read, particularly as a teen and college student, helped expose him to the ideas and experiences that would serve as Apple's foundation years later.

Walter Isaacson's 571-page biography of Jobs , a copy of which was purchased by The Huffington Post, provides an unprecedented look at the texts -- by writers ranging from William Shakespeare to Paramahansa Yogananda -- that influenced Jobs; "required reading" for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the visionary.

Less than a handful of the texts Isaacson mentions directly concern technology: one is Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma," which Isaacson writes , "deeply influenced" Jobs, and the other is Ron Rosenbaum's 1971 Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," a profile of hackers who could tap into phone networks that later gave rise to Jobs’ first collaboration with Steve Wozniak, who went on to become Apple's co-founder.

Jobs' interest in literature and the arts burgeoned during his junior and senior years of high school, which coincided with his first drug use. Jobs tried marijuana at 15 and before graduating high school began experimenting with LSD. (He later observed, "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life," he said.)

"I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology -- Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear ," Jobs recalled of his teen years. Isaacson notes that "Moby-Dick" and Dylan Thomas' poetry were among Jobs' favorite works at this point in his life.

During his freshman year at Reed College, Jobs befriended Daniel Kottke, who went on to work at Apple, and together they devoured books such as Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," Chogyam Trungpa's "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" and Paramahansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi," a book Jobs read and re-read many times during his life.

Isaacson writes,

Jobs found himself deeply influenced by a variety of books on spirituality and enlightenment, most notably Be Here Now, a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. "It was profound," Jobs said. "It transformed me and many of my friends."

Throughout his life, Jobs embraced numerous extreme, even obsessive, dietary regimes. He fasted periodically and, at various points, was a vegetarian, vegan and fruitarian, though he made an exception for unagi sushi while in Japan. This attitude toward food began to take shape in college after Jobs read "Diet for a Small Planet" by Frances Moore Lappe in his first year at Reed.

"That's when I swore off meat pretty much for good," Jobs told Isaacson, who adds Jobs became "even more obsessive" about food after reading Arnold Ehret's "Mucusless Diet Healing System."

One book in particular stayed with Jobs his entire life, and Isaacson noted that it was the only book Jobs had downloaded on his iPad 2: "Autobiography of a Yogi," "the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager," Isaacson writes, "then re-read in India and had read once a year ever since."

Yet no discussion of the artists who influenced Jobs is complete without mentioning the music that made the man.

Jobs called Bob Dylan "one of my heroes" and had over a dozen Dylan albums on his iPod, along with songs from seven different Beatles albums, six Rolling Stones albums and four albums by Jobs' onetime lover Joan Baez.

Jobs likened The Beatles' creative process to Apple's own. While listening to a bootleg CD from one of the band's recording sessions, Jobs remarked, "They did a bundle of work between each of these recordings. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect ... The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way."

He also framed his motivations and the principles that drove him forward in terms of Dylan and The Beatles.

"They kept evolving, moving, refining their art," Jobs said of the artists. "That's what I've always tried to do -- keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying."

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'This is a riveting book, with as much to say about the transformation of modern life in the information age as about its supernaturally gifted and driven subject' - Telegraph Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - this is the acclaimed, internationally bestselling biography of the ultimate icon of inventiveness. Walter Isaacson tells the story of the rollercoaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written, nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. And as Isaacson shows in a new afterword commemorating the tenth anniversary of Jobs's death, that vision remains even more vital today.

• Print length 608 pages
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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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5 Steve Jobs book titles worth reading!

Steve jobs was recognized as one of america’s most established industrial designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. he was renowned as the chairman and founder of apple inc., a brand currently estimated at a whopping value of usd 3 trillion. here are 5 steve jobs book titles to inspire you, table of contents, steve jobs by walter isaacson, small fry by lisa brennan-jobs , inside apple by adam lashinsky, the second coming of steve jobs by alan deutschman, steve jobs: the man who thought different by karen blumenthal, key takeaways.

A visionary and an innovator, Steve Jobs’ accomplishments are on par with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin & Larry Page. Each of these names is for its contributions to transforming consumerism and worldwide access to information. 

Even post-humously, Steve Jobs’ continues to impact the world with his authentic and exquisite product and technological development strategies.  If you want inspiration from this iconic figure, here are 5 Steve Jobs book titles worth adding to your library!

5 Steve Jobs book titles to read 

Needless to say, Steve Jobs led an exciting and intriguing life. His words, actions, and ideologies continue to resonate with the youth of today. 

Some of the best Steve Job book titles worth reading are – 

• This is a Steve Job book that is one of the most accurate depictions of his unique thoughts and insights. 
• In an autobiography crafted through a series of 40 interviews, every aspect of Jobs’ life is explained in detail. 
• Isaacson painstakingly elucidates Jobs’ approach to the personal computer and his revolutionizing of the technological marketplace. 
• The book covers the emergence of the iconic iPhone, iPad, and iPod. 
• Tablet computing
• Animated movies
• Personal computers
• In many ways, this Steve Jobs book is the opposite of the previous title in this list, including its approach to describing the individual. 
• The writer of ‘Small Fry’ is Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs and provides unique insights into his personality rather than his profession. 
• The book beautifully narrates the account of growing up with Steve Jobs in the 1970s and 1980s in California. This was a point in time when Silicon Valley was transforming at a rapid pace. 
• A writer by trade, Brennan-Jobs dives into the unique and singular complexities of living with a father who was ‘severely judgemental’. 
• Unlike the other Steve Jobs book titles that highlight his achievements and genius, this is a book that thrives on the concept of ‘every coin has two sides’. 
• The result is a read that offers a glimpse into Steve Jobs’ personal life and role as a rather overbearing and difficult parental authority figure. 
• ‘Inside Apple’ is one of the quicker Steve Jobs book title reads (240 pages) that provides an insight into the inner workings of the giant organization. 
• It is an intriguing read that provides incredible insight into where Apple has been. 
• Lashinsky also highlights where Apple could head in the post-Jobs era. 
• ‘Inside Apple’ paints, an entertaining and seemingly tightly edited picture of life at the company highlighted with pretty revealing interviews by dozens of Apple partners, staff, and executives. 
• The book also highlights how employees of the organization are unaware about new product launch. For example, employees can move around freely in parts of the organization’s campus that are directly related to the projects they are personally working on. The book highlights that it is not uncommon for employees to have access to rooms that even their boss does not have access to.
• This is a Steve Jobs book that was published in 2001 and highlights an important aspect of this personality’s life; his return to Apple after being ousted from the organization he founded more than a decade ago. 
• Deutschman describes how Jobs was singularly responsible for one of the biggest turnarounds in the history of corporate business.
• This title describes in significant detail the transformation of Apple from an organization hemorrhaging money to one making millions in profits.
• In a journalistic tone, Deutschman also explains how Jobs completely blew away his critics and left an indelible mark on the organization. 
• The book highlights several of his multifold leadership traits, forcing you to overlook his negative qualities. 
• If you appreciate and admire Steve Jobs and his accomplishments, this is a book that is especially worth reading. 

• This is another one of the Steve Job book titles that are an unbiased biography and description of the dark side of his life. 
• Blumenthal highlights the transformation initiated by Jobs through a bereaved childhood and as a hardworking youth. 
• The book is replete with authentic information such as Jobs’ speech for Stanford in 2005. 
• An aspect of Steve Jobs’ life is his decade-long battle with cancer, which is explained in painstaking detail in this book. 
• A unique feature of this title is the illustrative boxes that include bringing a unique perspective to this great business figure.
• Steve Jobs is an iconic figure who is well-known for his contributions to the field of technology with his brand ‘Apple’. 
• Steve Jobs inspires and engages the youth with his dynamic ideologies and killer business instincts that turned his startup into a thriving empire. 
• The above-listed Steve Jobs book titles give you a firsthand glimpse into this personality’s difficult, demanding, yet rewarding life. 

Did you enjoy this blog? If yes, please share your thoughts in the comments below. Click here to reach out to us for more information on the best Steve Jobs book titles to add to your reading list. We would be happy to assist you with your queries! 

Liked this blog? Read next: Top 9 motivational speeches students should listen to

Q1. Did Steve Jobs engage in any philanthropic work? 

Answer – Yes, he did! Steve Jobs’ philanthropic efforts were rarely public. His contribution to several projects like AIDS and donations of over USD 50 million to Stanford hospitals took the news.

Q2. Why was the iPod so popular? 

Answer – Released in 2001, the iPod was one of the first innovative and user-friendly means of accessing music on the go. Syncing the device with Apple’s iTunes program, the iPod gave millions of users the means to carry and purchase hundreds of songs. 

Q3. What was the next product to be released after the iPod? 

Answer – The next product to be released after the iPod was the iPhone, which combined the features of an iPod with a computer and a phone. The iPhone also featured an exclusive AppStore that completely liberated users from purchasing content from wireless carriers.

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Steve Jobs: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Business Leaders) Kindle Edition

• Adoption and Childhood
• Meeting Steve Wozniak
• India: Search for Enlightenment
• From Atari to Apple
• Forced out from Apple
• The iPhone and Beyond
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• Part of series Biographies of Business Leaders
• Print length 105 pages
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BVMXWVGQ
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hourly History (February 12, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 12, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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• #1 in Biographies of Business Professionals
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