Steve Jobs (24 February 1955, San Francisco, California - 5 October 2011, Palo Alto, California) was an American inventor, best known for co-founding Apple; he also co-founded Pixar and founded NeXT. He was a pioneer of the computer revolution in the 1970s and '80s, along with Steve Wozniak.
You can read more about Steve Jobs's early, pre-Apple life in this biography
Steve Jobs co-founded the Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976 with Steve Wozniak, a former high school friend, and Ronald Wayne as a bussiness partnership to develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer, which he had finished in March 1976. Steve Wozniak initially hesitated to sell his computer, but eventually accepted Steve Jobs's idea to market and sell the Apple I. Their operations initially started in Steve Jobs's bedroom and later moved to the garage. 12 days later, Ronald Wayne sold his 10% share of Apple for $800, which would've been worth 270 billion dollars in 2023.
The two chose the name Apple after Jobs's time at the All One Farm Commune in Oregon, at the farm's apple orchard.
Steve Jobs planned to sell bare printed circuit boards of the Apple I for $50 each (equivalent to $274 in late 2023). To fund this effort, Steve Jobs sold his HP calculator and Steve Wozniak sold his Volkswagen van. Later that year, Paul Teller bought 50 fully assembled Apple Is for $500 each and founded the first PC retailer shop in December 1975, being the first retailer to sell the Apple I. Eventually, 200 Apple Is were produced in total.
In April 1977, 1 year after Apple's founding, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple II, an 8-bit home computer, at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, California, U.S. The Apple II was primarily designed by Steve Wozniak, while Steve Jobs oversaw development of the computer's unusual case, and Rod Holt, Apple employee #5, developed the unique power supply. While designing the Apple II, Jobs and Wozniak disagreed on the number of expansion slots: Jobs wanted 2, while Wozniak wanted 8. They eventually agreed on 8 slots. The Apple II became one of the first highly-successful microcomputers in the world.
Steve Jobs's relationship with his girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, quickly deteriorated as she got pregnant. Steve Jobs denied paternity, though a DNA test established him as the father of Lisa Brennan-Jobs, born May 17, 1978.
In 1978, at the age of 23, Steve Jobs was worth $1 million ($4.5 million in 2023). By 1980, age 25, his net worth grew to $250 million ($450 million in 2022). Also starting from 1978, Apple developed the Lisa, which was sold until the early 1980s. The Lisa sold poorly at a measly 100,000 units, although it was the first PC with a GUI for bussiness users. Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project in 1982.
In 1983, Steve Jobs convinced John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as CEO of Apple, telling him
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared drinks, or do you want a chance to change
the world?"
.
The same year, the company made the quickest entry into the Fortune 500 list of America's top companies.
In 1981, Jobs took over development of the Macintosh, in the absence of Steve Wozniak who was recovering
from a
traumatic plane accident
.
The Macintosh had been conceived by Jef Raskin (1943 - 2005), an early Apple employee. On 22 January 1984,
Steve Jobs aired the famous, $1.5 million,
Ridley Scott
1984 Macintosh ad,
featuring an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh as saving the humanity from IBM's
domination of the computer industry. It ended with the words:
"On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'."
Two days later, an emotional Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholders meeting in Flint Auditorium at De Anza College, as the audience cheered at the sight of the Macintosh's GUI, inspired by Lisa, released 1 year prior, which in turn was inspired by Xerox's PARC mouse-driven GUI. The Macintosh also had text-to-speech abilities. The computer was widely acclaimed by the media with strong initial sales, though its low performance, lack of software, and high price led to a rapid decline in sales in the second half of 1984.
The Macintosh released as the first mass-market personal computer with a GUI and mouse.
Sculley and Jobs had differing views for Apple: Jobs favored a close architecture design, like the Macintosh, as an alternative to the IBM PC, while Sculley favored open architecture, like the Apple II. Therefore, Apple operated like two differing companies under two different divisions. And although the Apple II division provided 85% of the company's revenue, it went unmentioned in the 1985 annual meeting. Many left as a result, including Wozniak, who remained an honorary employee of Apple and maintained a lifelong friendship with Steve Jobs regardless.
By 1985, it became clear the Macintosh failed to defeat the IBM PC. This strengthened Sculley's position within Apple. As a result, both Jobs and Sculley made plans to remove one another from the company. Jobs's plan was leaked and he eventually resigned on 17 September 1985. Five more senior employees left Apple and joined Jobs's new venture, NeXT.
In 1996, Apple was struggling for its survival that depended on the next
OS they'd develop. After failing to buy
Be Inc., Apple finalised a deal with NeXT
for $400 million in February 1997, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company as the de facto chief. Then-CEO Gil
Amelio (1943 -) was ousted in July 1997, and Steve Jobs became interim CEO on 16 September. Jobs quickly
set up an alliance with Apple's rival, Microsoft,
scrapped the previous Mac-clone agreements, greatly simplified the product line, and engineered a successful
ad campaign, encouraging customers to
'think different'
and buy Macs.
He also refused to produce computers that ran Windows, Microsoft's OS, and he refused to spin off Apple as a
software-only company.
In March 1998, Steve Jobs terminated several Apple projects, such as Newton (PDA), Cyberdog (Internet suite), and OpenDoc (Compound document framework). Within a few months, Apple employees developed a fear of Steve Jobs's 'summary executions'; although these terminations were rare, it only took few to provoke terror across the company.
Apple went on to develop Mac OS X, based on NeXTSTEP, and the iMac, going down the route of appealing designs and powerful branding.
With the iMac G3 released on August 15, 1998, Apple boasted "the back of our computer looks better than
the front of anyone else's"
. The design was intented to create a personal connection with the product,
with elements such as the handle and the breathing effect when the iMac went to sleep. The release price was
$1,299 and the iMac featured innovative changes, such as a lack of floppy disk drives and exclusive use
of USB for peripherals. By the end of 1998, the iMac became the U.S.'s best selling personal computer.
In 1999, Apple released the iBook, a sleek laptop built for students.
Apple subsequently branched out and entered the market of consumer electronics and music players with the introduction of the iPod and iTunes in 2001, and the iTunes Store in 2003. On 29 June 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, a revolutionary mobile phone, with a multi-touch display, iPod features, and internet browsing, which forever reshaped the industry. The iPad, an iOS-based tablet, released in 2010.
iTunes is a media player and library, online broadcaster, and mobile device manager app. It can play, organise, and download digital audio and video, being available on macOS and Windows. The iTunes Store is available on iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad, where users can buy music, shows, audiobooks, podcasts, films, and ringtones.
The first-ever iPod was releaed on 23 October 2001, featuring a revolutionary small size, with its 5-to-10GB 1.8 inch hard drive, compared to the common 2.5-inch drives common in MP3 players at the time. The release price was $399, and 100,000 iPods were sold by the end of 2001. The success of the first iPod would pave the way for the iTunes Store, the iPhone, and further iPods such as the smaller iPod Mini and Nano, and the screenless iPod Shuffle.
The first iPad released on 3 April 2010, featuring a user interface built around the tablet's touch controls, including a virtual keyboard. The iPad comes with built-in Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity on some devices.
| 1 | Steve Wozniak (1950 - living) |
| 2 | Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011) |
| 3 | Mike Markkula (1942 - living) |
| 4 | Bill Fernandez |
| 5 | Rod Holt (1934 - living) |
| 6 | Randy Wigginton |
| 7 | Michael Scott (1945 - living) |
| 8 | Chris Espinosa (1961 - living) |
| 9 | Jim Martindale (1945 - living) |
| 10 | Sherry Livingston |
| 11 | Don Breuner |
| 12 | Dan Kottke (1954 - living) |
| 13 | Mark Johnson |
| 14 | Gene Carter (1934 - living) |
| 15 | Thomas Whitney (1939 - 1986) |
| 16 | Wendell Sander (1935 - living) |
| 17 | Gary Martin (c. 1947 - living) |
| 18 | Dana Redington (1951 - living) |
| 19 | Clive Twyman (1953 - living) |
Following his resignation from Apple in September 1985, Steve Jobs founded NeXT with $7 million. After a year, he was running out of money. He sought venture funding, attracting the attention of billionare Ross Perot.
Eventually, Steve Jobs held a lavish invitation-only gala launch event on 12 October 1988, launching the NeXT computer, the company's first and flagship product, with an introductory price of $6,500 (equivalent to $16,100 in 2022). The NeXT computer featured a Motorola 68030 25 MHz CPU, 8 MB of RAM, expandable to 64 MB, 256 MB of storage, and a MegaPixel 17" monitor with a resolution of 1120x832, four-level grayscale.
NeXT computers were designed for the education sector, but were price-restrictive.
Tim Bernes-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 at CERN in Switzerland on a NeXT computer.
The revised, more affordable, second generation of the NeXT computer was released in 1990. Jobs advertised it as the first “interpersonal computer”, claiming it would replace PCs with its innovative email system, having the ability to share voice, image, graphics, and video. Regardless, the second NeXT computer only sold 50,000 units and, by 1993, NeXT completely switched to software. The next year, the company reported its first yearly profit of $1.03 million.
In 1986, Steve Jobs funded the spinout of the Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division with $10 million. The first film produced by Pixar in partnership with Disney, Toy Story (1995), credited Steve Jobs as executive producer.
