🇺🇸Steve
Jobs

The garage at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, is modest and unremarkable — a one-story ranch house in a suburb where every house looks more or less like the one next to it. In 1976, it was the workspace of a twenty-one-year-old named Steve Jobs and his twenty-five-year-old friend Steve Wozniak, who together were assembling circuit boards on a wooden workbench and selling them by hand to early computer hobbyists. Jobs wore his hair long and his feet bare, and he had an intensity about him that people who met him in those years consistently described as magnetic and slightly frightening. He was not the one doing most of the technical work — Wozniak was an engineering genius of the first order, able to conceive hardware solutions that others wouldn't arrive at for years. What Jobs had was something different: a sense of what the machine could mean, and to whom, and the ferocious will to make that vision real.

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, and adopted at birth by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California. His adoptive father was a machinist who worked with his hands, and the family garage was always full of electronics. Jobs absorbed the ethic of craft — the idea that the parts you couldn't see mattered as much as the parts you could — early, and never lost it. At thirteen he called Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, directly at home to ask for spare parts for an electronics project. Hewlett answered, talked with him for twenty minutes, and gave him the parts — and a summer job. Jobs was not a prodigiously technical child in the way Wozniak was, but he was intensely curious, and he had a quality that would define his adult work: he couldn't tolerate things that were badly made.

He enrolled at Reed College in Portland in 1972 and dropped out after one semester, staying on campus for another eighteen months to audit the classes that interested him — most notably a calligraphy course that, he later said, gave him the typographic sensibility that would make the Macintosh the first personal computer to use beautiful proportional fonts. In 1974 he went to India to study Buddhism. He returned to California, worked briefly at Atari, and in 1975 began attending the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, where Wozniak was showing off the machine he had built — a computer on a single board, no kit required, completely self-contained. Jobs saw the potential immediately. He persuaded Wozniak to go into business together.

Apple Computer was incorporated on April 1, 1976. The Apple I sold for $666.66. The Apple II, launched in 1977, was the first personal computer designed to appeal to ordinary consumers — it came in a molded plastic case, it had a color display, and it worked out of the box. It sold in the hundreds of thousands and made Apple the fastest-growing company in American history to that point. In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh with a Super Bowl advertisement that positioned the company as a rebel against conformity — against IBM's "Big Brother" corporate dominance of computing. The Macintosh introduced the graphical user interface and the mouse to mainstream consumers. It was not the first computer with those features, but it was the first one that made them feel inevitable.

In 1985, after a power struggle with the board he had helped appoint, Jobs was forced out of Apple. He was thirty years old. He bought a small animation studio from George Lucas for $5 million and renamed it Pixar. He founded a computer company called NeXT. Pixar, in 1995, released Toy Story — the first feature film made entirely with computer animation — and Jobs's stake in the company eventually made him Disney's largest individual shareholder. NeXT's software became the foundation for Apple's operating system when Apple, facing bankruptcy, bought the company in 1997 for $429 million and brought Jobs back as interim CEO.

What followed was the most remarkable second act in corporate history. Jobs stripped Apple's product line from hundreds of SKUs to four. He launched the iMac — a translucent, candy-colored all-in-one computer that signaled, unmistakably, that design was not decoration but function. He launched iTunes and the iPod in 2001, which together put a thousand songs in a pocket and eventually displaced the music industry's entire business model. On January 9, 2007, he walked onto a stage in San Francisco and announced the iPhone: a widescreen iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone, and an internet communicator, all in one device. "Every once in a while," he said, "a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." The iPhone was that product. Apple became, briefly, the most valuable company in the world. Jobs died of pancreatic cancer on October 5, 2011, at fifty-six. He had been sick for eight years, often secretly, often visibly.