To think they can change 1 page

The world are the ones who do.

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

CONTENTS

Characters

Introduction: How This Book Came to Be

CHAPTER ONE

Childhood: Abandoned and Chosen

CHAPTER TWO

Odd Couple: The Two Steves

CHAPTER THREE

The Dropout: Turn On, Tune In . . .

CHAPTER FOUR

Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design

CHAPTER FIVE

The Apple I: Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .

CHAPTER SIX

The Apple II: Dawn of a New Age

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chrisann and Lisa: He Who Is Abandoned . . .

CHAPTER EIGHT

Xerox and Lisa: Graphical User Interfaces

CHAPTER NINE

Going Public: A Man of Wealth and Fame

CHAPTER TEN

The Mac Is Born: You Say You Want a Revolution

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Reality Distortion Field: Playing by His Own Set of Rules

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Design: Real Artists Simplify

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Building the Mac: The Journey Is the Reward

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Enter Sculley: The Pepsi Challenge

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Launch: A Dent in the Universe

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Gates and Jobs: When Orbits Intersect

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Icarus: What Goes Up . . .

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

NeXT: Prometheus Unbound

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Pixar: Technology Meets Art

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Regular Guy: Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Family Man: At Home with the Jobs Clan

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Toy Story: Buzz and Woody to the Rescue

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Second Coming:

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last . . .

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Restoration: The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Think Different: Jobs as iCEO

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The iMac: Hello (Again)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CEO: Still Crazy after All These Years

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Apple Stores: Genius Bars and Siena Sandstone

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Digital Hub: From iTunes to the iPod

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The iTunes Store: I’m the Pied Piper

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Music Man: The Sound Track of His Life

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Pixar’s Friends: . . . and Foes

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Twenty-first-century Macs: Setting Apple Apart

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Round One: Memento Mori

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The iPhone: Three Revolutionary Products in One

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Round Two: The Cancer Recurs

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The iPad: Into the Post-PC Era

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

New Battles: And Echoes of Old Ones

CHAPTER FORTY

To Infinity: The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Round Three: The Twilight Struggle

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Legacy: The Brightest Heaven of Invention

Acknowledgments

Sources

Notes

Index

Illustration Credits

Photos

CHARACTERS

AL ALCORN. Chief engineer at Atari, who designed Pong and hired Jobs.

GIL AMELIO. Became CEO of Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back.

BILL ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh.

CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs’s girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS. Daughter of Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer in

New York City.

NOLAN BUSHNELL. Founder of Atari and entrepreneurial role model for Jobs.

BILL CAMPBELL. Apple marketing chief during Jobs’s first stint at Apple and board member

and confidant after Jobs’s return in 1997.

EDWIN CATMULL. A cofounder of Pixar and later a Disney executive.

KOBUN CHINO. A Soōtoō Zen master in California who became Jobs’s spiritual teacher.

LEE CLOW. Advertising wizard who created Apple’s “1984” ad and worked with Jobs for three

decades.

DEBORAH “DEBI” COLEMAN. Early Mac team manager who took over Apple manufacturing.

TIM COOK. Steady, calm, chief operating officer hired by Jobs in 1998; replaced Jobs as Apple

CEO in August 2011.

EDDY CUE. Chief of Internet services at Apple, Jobs’s wingman in dealing with content

companies.

ANDREA “ANDY” CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna’s firm who handled Apple in the

early Macintosh years.

MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs.

LARRY ELLISON. CEO of Oracle and personal friend of Jobs.

TONY FADELL. Punky engineer brought to Apple in 2001 to develop the iPod.

SCOTT FORSTALL. Chief of Apple’s mobile device software.

ROBERT FRIEDLAND. Reed student, proprietor of an apple farm commune, and spiritual seeker

who influenced Jobs, then went on to run a mining company.

JEAN-LOUIS GASSÉE. Apple’s manager in France, took over the Macintosh division when Jobs

was ousted in 1985.

BILL GATES. The other computer wunderkind born in 1955.

ANDY HERTZFELD. Playful, friendly software engineer and Jobs’s pal on the original Mac team.

JOANNA HOFFMAN. Original Mac team member with the spirit to stand up to Jobs.

ELIZABETH HOLMES. Daniel Kottke’s girlfriend at Reed and early Apple employee.

ROD HOLT. Chain-smoking Marxist hired by Jobs in 1976 to be the electrical engineer on the

Apple II.

ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005.

JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant.

ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became

biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the

Boomtown casino near Reno.

CLARA HAGOPIANJobs. Daughter of Armenian immigrants, married Paul Jobs in 1946; they

adopted Steve soon after his birth in 1955.

ERIN JOBS. Middle child of Laurene Powell and Steve Jobs.

EVE JOBS. Youngest child of Laurene and Steve.

PATTY JOBS. Adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs two years after they adopted Steve.

PAUL REINHOLDJobs. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted

Steve in 1955.

REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell.

RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores.

JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to

cofound DreamWorks SKG.

DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee.

JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar.

DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT.

MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs.

REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor.

MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director.

PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get

the iPhone business.

LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then

Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991.

GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer.

ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure.

JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer

at Apple in 1997.

MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.

JOHN SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and

ousted Jobs in 1985.

JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom

she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised.

MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and

became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here),

Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost

Father).

ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs.

BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled programmer on the original Mac team, afflicted with

schizophrenia in the 1990s.

AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software

engineer at Apple in 1997.

JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner

at the ad agency Apple hired.

RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple,

but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake.

STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to

package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple.

INTRODUCTION

How This Book Came to Be

In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly

to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new

product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But

now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit

about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer

campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to

take a walk so that we could talk.

That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have

a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently

published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial

reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that

sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many

more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and

extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then, attacking a Time correspondent for having

wounded him with a story that was too revealing. But talking to him afterward, I found myself

rather captivated, as so many others have been over the years, by his engaging intensity. We

stayed in touch, even after he was

ousted from Apple. When he had something to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie,

the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant

in Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever

produced. I liked him.

When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put him on the cover of Time, and soon

thereafter he began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing on the most influential people

of the century. He had launched his “Think Different” campaign, featuring iconic photos of some

of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence

fascinating.

After I had deflected his suggestion that I write a biography of him, I heard from him every

now and then. At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the

Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German

wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he

wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t. That started an exchange about the early history of

Apple, and I found myself gathering string on the subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a

book. When my Einstein biography came out, he came to a book event in Palo Alto and pulled me

aside to suggest, again, that he would make a good subject.

His persistence baffled me. He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe

he’d ever read any of my books. Maybe someday, I continued to say. But in 2009 his wife,

Laurene Powell, said bluntly, “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve, you’d better do it now.”

He had just taken a second medical leave. I confessed to her that when he had first raised the idea,

I hadn’t known he was sick. Almost nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was

going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained.

I decided then to write this book. Jobs surprised me by readily acknowledging that he would

have no control over it or even the right to see it in advance. “It’s your book,” he said. “I won’t

even read it.” But later that fall he seemed to have second thoughts about cooperating and, though

I didn’t know it, was hit by another round of cancer complications.

He stopped returning my calls, and I put the project aside for a while.

Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2009. He was at

home in Palo Alto with only his sister, the writer Mona Simpson. His wife and their three children

had taken a quick trip to go skiing, but he was not healthy enough to join them. He was in a

reflective mood, and we talked for more than an hour. He began by recalling that he had wanted to

build a frequency counter when he was twelve, and he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the

founder of HP, in the phone book and call him to get parts. Jobs said that the past twelve years of

his life, since his return to Apple, had been his most productive in terms of creating new products.

But his more important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had

done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would

outlive them.

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said.

“Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance

of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what

I wanted to do.” It was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at

least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the

humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested

me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating

innovative economies in the twenty-first century.

I asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. “I think you’re good at

getting people to talk,” he replied. That was an unexpected answer. I knew that I would have to

interview scores of people he had fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared

he would not be comfortable with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out to be

skittish when word trickled back to him of people that I was interviewing. But after a couple of

months, he began encouraging people to talk to me, even foes and former girlfriends. Nor did he

try to put anything off-limits. “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my

girlfriend pregnant when

I was twenty-three and the way I handled that,” he said. “But I don’t have any skeletons in my

closet that can’t be allowed out.” He didn’t seek any control over what I wrote, or even ask to read

it in advance. His only involvement came when my publisher was choosing the cover art. When he

saw an early version of a proposed cover treatment, he disliked it so much that he asked to have

input in designing a new version. I was both amused and willing, so I readily assented.

I ended up having more than forty interviews and conversations with him. Some were formal

ones in his Palo Alto living room, others were done during long walks and drives or by telephone.

During my two years of visits, he became increasingly intimate and revealing, though at times I

witnessed what his veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his “reality distortion field.”

Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory cells that happens to us all; at other times

he was spinning his own version of reality both to me and to himself. To check and flesh out his

story, I interviewed more than a hundred friends, relatives, competitors, adversaries, and

colleagues.

His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I

would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his

strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts

of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on.

“You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to

see that it’s all told truthfully.”

I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are

players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes

got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger,

which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong

positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve

done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I

used.

This is a book about the roller-coaster 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. You might even add a seventh, retail stores,

which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new

market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not

only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his

DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his

vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his

parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company.

This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways

to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative

digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and

sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to

connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were

combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think

differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but

whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed.

He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he

could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products

were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated

system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation,

character, leadership, and values.

Shakespeare’s Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate

but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation “O

for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.” For Steve Jobs, the

ascent to the brightest heaven of invention begins with a tale of two sets of parents, and of

growing up in a valley that was just learning how to turn silicon into gold.

CHAPTER ONE

CHILDHOOD

Abandoned and Chosen

The Adoption

When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with

his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and

Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine

mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his looks that got

him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the

fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with

that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It

would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty

years later.

Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though

his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm

disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the

Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even

though he didn’t know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent

much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman

earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose

above the rank of seaman.

Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia,

and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret

that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been

killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life.

Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it

was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had

little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a few years, then

headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was

tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them.

Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman.

Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back

there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate

Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a “repo man,” picking the locks of cars

whose owners hadn’t paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold

some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process.

There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara had

suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian tube rather

than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage,

they were looking to adopt a child.

Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her

father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife

owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including

real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter’s

relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic.

Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student

at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a Muslim

teaching assistant from Syria.

Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil

refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and Homs, and at one

point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother, he later said, was a

“traditional Muslim woman” who was a “conservative, obedient housewife.” Like the Schieble

family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school,

even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American University in

Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science.

In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in

Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin

she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they decided not to get

married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed

Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early 1955,

Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into the care of a kindly doctor who

sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions.

Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the doctor

arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was born—on

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