Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
The life of Apple's restless, demanding founder, and how he joined art and technology to change six industries
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- Published 2011
Introduction
Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, follows a life of extremes. An adopted child from California dropped out of college, built the Apple II and the Macintosh, was pushed out of his own company, came back to rescue it, and led it to the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, while also turning Pixar into a leading animation studio. Jobs himself asked Isaacson to write the book. It rests on more than forty interviews with Jobs over two years and on interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, rivals and colleagues. Jobs asked for no control over what was written and did not read it in advance.
The book's forty-two chapters follow his life in order. Isaacson has two themes: that the greatest creativity comes where the humanities meet technology, and that Jobs's personality, with its brilliance and its cruelty, was bound up with his products. This summary follows the 2011 text and reports events as Isaacson tells them, including the memories of the people he interviewed, which sometimes differ.
Jobs died in October 2011, a few weeks before the book was published.
- 1Isaacson traces Jobs's drive back to a childhood in which he felt both abandoned and chosen, and to a father who cared about the parts no one sees
- 2Wozniak's engineering, and Jobs's own restless search at Reed, at Atari and in India, gave the young Jobs the partner and the habits of mind that shaped Apple
- 3Apple began when Jobs turned Wozniak's brilliant circuit board into a complete, friendly product and built a company around it
- 4At Xerox Jobs saw the future of the personal computer, and he drove a small “pirate” team to build the Macintosh through sheer force of will
- 5Jobs hired John Sculley to help run Apple, and two years later he lost a boardroom battle with him and was pushed out of his own company
- 6In his years away, NeXT taught Jobs through costly failure, while Pixar, a side investment, became a triumph that made him a fortune
- 7Jobs at first denied that he was the father of his daughter Lisa; later he found his birth family, married, and slowly became a family man, though not an easy one
- 8Back at a failing Apple in 1997, Jobs saved it through focus: he cut most of its products, teamed up with Jony Ive and launched the iMac
- 9By making the Mac a “digital hub” and controlling every step from device to store, Jobs turned Apple into the company that changed music
- 10Afraid that phones would make the iPod unnecessary, Jobs led Apple to the iPhone and the iPad, and he fought for a closed, tightly controlled system
- 11Jobs's habit of ignoring what he did not want to face shaped how he handled his cancer, and he kept working almost to the end
- 12Isaacson concludes that Jobs's personality and his products formed one integrated system, and that his genius lay in joining the humanities with technology
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