(Reuters) - Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday
after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Here are some of Apple's milestones:
1976 - High-school buddies Steven Wozniak and Steve Jobs start Apple Computer.
Their first product, Apple I, built in circuit board form, debuts at "the
Homebrew Computer Club" in Palo Alto, California.
1977 - Apple II is unveiled, the first personal computer in a plastic case with
color graphics.
1983 - Apple starts selling the "Lisa," a desktop computer for businesses with a
graphical user interface, the system most users are familiar with today.
1984 - Apple debuts the Macintosh personal computer.
1985 - Jobs leaves Apple after a power struggle.
September 1997 - Jobs is named Apple's interim CEO after the company records
losses of more than $1.8 billion.
November 1997 - Jobs introduces a new line of Macintosh computers called G3, and
a website that lets people order directly from Apple.
1998 - Apple unveils the iMac desktop computer.
2001 - Apple introduces the iPod.
2003 - The iTunes Store opens, allowing users to buy and download music,
audiobooks, movies and TV shows online.
August 2004 - Jobs announces he underwent successful surgery to remove a
cancerous tumor from his pancreas.
January 2007 - Apple introduces the iPhone.
2008 - Apple opens its App Store as an update to iTunes.
January 2009 - Jobs takes leave for health reasons. COO Cook leads the company
in the interim.
June 2009 - Jobs returns to the company after undergoing a liver transplant.
April 2010 - Apple begins selling the iPad, a 10-inch touchscreen tablet, and
has an 84 percent share of the tablet market by year's end.
January 17, 2011 - Jobs announces that he will take another medical leave.
March 2, 2011 - Apple launches the iPad 2.
August 9, 2011 - Apple briefly edges past Exxon Mobil Corp to become the most
valuable U.S. company.
August 24, 2011 - Jobs steps down as CEO and is replaced by Tim Cook, Apple's
chief operating officer.
October 5, 2011 - Jobs dies at age of 56 after battle with pancreatic cancer.
Steven P.
Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal
computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and
mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He
was 56.
The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school
friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.
A friend of the family said that Mr. Jobs died of complications from pancreatic
cancer, with which he waged a long and public struggle, remaining the face of
the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new
products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt
and frail.
He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three
medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in
August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating
officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs,
negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.
“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my
duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you
know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that
day has come.”
By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive
marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer
industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered
on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3
billion.
Tributes to Mr. Jobs flowed quickly on Wednesday evening, in formal statements
and in the flow of social networks, with President Obama, technology industry
leaders and legions of Apple fans weighing in.
A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an
ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”
Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the
Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use.
After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out
with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the
creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone
and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players
and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.
During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from
the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and
animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.
Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won
several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the
full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and
adults worldwide.
Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he
think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader,
choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the
final call on product design.
It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his
meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic
and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.
“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force
without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,”
which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up
tricks from Steve Jobs.”
“Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr.
Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you
need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said
Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case,
he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”
Mr. Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were
exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for
example, before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007.
To his understanding of technology he brought an immersion in popular culture.
In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party.
His worldview was shaped by the ’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay
Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When
he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said, ”the very strong
scent of the 1960s was still there.”
After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland,
Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a
reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he
had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had
not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife —
could never understand.
Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he
maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like
an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon
Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the
invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture
publication.
Apple’s very name reflected his unconventionality. In an era when engineers and
hobbyists tended to describe their machines with model numbers, he chose the
name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary habits at the time.
Coming on the scene just as computing began to move beyond the walls of research
laboratories and corporations in the 1970s, Mr. Jobs saw that computing was
becoming personal — that it could do more than crunch numbers and solve
scientific and business problems — and that it could even be a force for social
and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers were boxy wooden
affairs with metal chassis, he designed the Apple II as a sleek, low-slung
plastic package intended for the den or the kitchen. He was offering not just
products but a digital lifestyle.
He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a
sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted
users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose
yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those
things into what you are doing.”
Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Mr. Jobs
turned in the late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Mr. Jobs’s genius
lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to strip
away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple,
elegant reality remained.”
Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When
asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not
the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
Early
Interests
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, and surrendered for
adoption by his biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah
Jandali, a graduate student from Syria who became a political science professor.
He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.
The elder Mr. Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before returning to
his original trade as a machinist, moved his family down the San Francisco
Peninsula to Mountain View and then to Los Altos in the 1960s.
Mr. Jobs developed an early interest in electronics. He was mentored by a
neighbor, an electronics hobbyist, who built Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics
projects. He was brash from an early age. As an eighth grader, after discovering
that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he
telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Hewlett spoke
with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and
offered him a job as a summer intern.
Mr. Jobs met Mr. Wozniak while attending Homestead High School in neighboring
Cupertino. The two took an introductory electronics class there.
The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Mr. Wozniak’s mother.
Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of
California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue
of Esquire magazine. The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron
Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobbyist culture of young men known as phone
phreaks who were illicitly exploring the nation’s phone system.
Mr. Wozniak shared the article with Mr. Jobs, and the two set out to track down
an elusive figure identified in the article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken
the name from his discovery that a whistle that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch
cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long-distance
calls simply by blowing the whistle next to a phone handset.
Captain Crunch was John Draper, a former Air Force electronic technician, and
finding him took several weeks. Learning that the two young hobbyists were
searching for him, Mr. Draper appeared one day in Mr. Wozniak’s Berkeley
dormitory room. Mr. Jobs, who was still in high school, had traveled to Berkeley
for the meeting. When Mr. Draper arrived, he entered the room saying simply, “It
is I!”
Based on information they gleaned from Mr. Draper, Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs
later collaborated on building and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely
used for making free — and illegal — phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000
from the effort.
After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Mr. Jobs left after one semester, but
remained in Portland for another 18 months auditing classes. In a commencement
address given at Stanford in 2005, he said he had decided to leave college
because it was consuming all of his parents’ savings.
Leaving school, however, also freed his curiosity to follow his interests. “I
didn’t have a dorm room,” he said in his Stanford speech, “so I slept on the
floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy
food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to
get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of
what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be
priceless later on.”
He returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job there as a technician at
Atari, the video game manufacturer. Still searching for his calling, he left
after several months and traveled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke,
who would later become an early Apple employee. Mr. Jobs returned to Atari that
fall. In 1975, he and Mr. Wozniak, then working as an engineer at H.P., began
attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at
the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif. Personal computing
had been pioneered at research laboratories adjacent to Stanford, and it was
spreading to the outside world.
“What I remember is how intense he looked,” said Lee Felsenstein, a computer
designer who was a Homebrew member. “He was everywhere, and he seemed to be
trying to hear everything people had to say.”
Mr. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his
friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs who had the inspiration that it could
be a commercial product.
In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an
initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel
executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000. Mr. Wozniak would be the
technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple I Computer.
Starting out in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, they moved the company to a
small office in Cupertino shortly thereafter.
In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast
Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensation. Faced with a gaggle of
small and large competitors in the emerging computer market, Apple, with its
Apple II, had figured out a way to straddle the business and consumer markets by
building a computer that could be customized for specific applications.
Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the
company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever
joined the list so quickly.
The Apple III, introduced in May 1980, was intended to dominate the desktop
computer market. I.B.M. would not introduce its original personal computer until
1981. But the Apple III had a host of technical problems, and Mr. Jobs shifted
his focus to a new and ultimately short-lived project, an office workstation
computer code-named Lisa.
An
Apocalyptic Moment
By then Mr. Jobs had made his much-chronicled 1979 visit to Xerox’s research
center in Palo Alto, where he saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer
system that foreshadowed modern desktop computing. The Alto, controlled by a
mouse pointing device, was one of the first computers to employ a graphical
video display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs,
adopting the metaphor of an office desktop.
“It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments,” Mr. Jobs said of his visit in
a 1995 oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution. “I remember
within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing
that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw
it. It didn’t require tremendous intellect. It was so clear.”
In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple engineers pursuing a separate project,
a lower-cost system code-named Macintosh. The machine was introduced in January
1984 and trumpeted during the Super Bowl telecast by a 60-second commercial,
directed by Ridley Scott, that linked I.B.M., by then the dominant PC maker,
with Orwell’s Big Brother.
A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief
executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief executive, Mr. Sculley was impressed by Mr.
Jobs’s pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water,
or do you want a chance to change the world?”
He went on to help Mr. Jobs introduce a number of new computer models, including
an advanced version of the Apple II and later the Lisa and Macintosh desktop
computers. Through them Mr. Jobs popularized the graphical user interface,
which, based on a mouse pointing device, would become the standard way to
control computers.
But when the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved
disappointing, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued, and Mr.
Jobs lost control of the Lisa project. The board ultimately stripped him of his
operational role, taking control of the Lisa project away from, and 1,200 Apple
employees were laid off. He left Apple in 1985.
“I don’t wear the right kind of pants to run this company,” he told a small
gathering of Apple employees before he left, according to a member of the
original Macintosh development team. He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing
blue jeans.
That September he announced a new venture, NeXT Inc. The aim was to build a
workstation computer for the higher-education market. The next year, the Texas
industrialist H. Ross Perot invested $20 million in the effort. But it did not
achieve Mr. Jobs’s goals.
Mr. Jobs also established a personal philanthropic foundation after leaving
Apple but soon had a change of heart, deciding instead to spend much of his
fortune — $10 million — on acquiring Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing
company owned by the filmmaker George Lucas.
The purchase was a significant gamble; there was little market at the time for
computer-animated movies. But that changed in 1995, when the company, with Walt
Disney Pictures, released “Toy Story.” That film’s box-office receipts
ultimately reached $362 million, and when Pixar went public in a record-breaking
offering, Mr. Jobs emerged a billionaire. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company
agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. The sale made Mr. Jobs Disney’s
largest single shareholder, with about 7 percent of the company’s stock.
His personal life also became more public. He had a number of well-publicized
romantic relationships, including one with the folk singer Joan Baez, before
marrying Laurene Powell. In 1996, a sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, threw a
spotlight on her relationship with Mr. Jobs in the novel “A Regular Guy.” The
two did not meet until they were adults. The novel centered on a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur who bore a close resemblance to Mr. Jobs. It was not an entirely
flattering portrait. Mr. Jobs said about a quarter of it was accurate.
“We’re family,” he said of Ms. Simpson in an interview with The New York Times
Magazine. “She’s one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her
every couple of days.”
His wife and Ms. Simpson survive him, as do his three children with Ms. Powell,
his daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed; another daughter,
Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with Chrisann Brennan; and another
sister, Patti Jobs.
Return to
Apple
Eventually, Mr. Jobs refocused NeXT from the education to the business market
and dropped the hardware part of the company, deciding to sell just an operating
system. Although NeXT never became a significant computer industry player, it
had a huge impact: a young programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to
develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics research
center CERN in 1990.
In 1996, after unsuccessful efforts to develop next-generation operating
systems, Apple, with Gilbert Amelio now in command, acquired NeXT for $430
million. The next year, Mr. Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser. He became
chief executive again in 2000.
Shortly after returning, Mr. Jobs publicly ended Apple’s long feud with its
archrival Microsoft, which agreed to continue developing its Office software for
the Macintosh and invested $150 million in Apple.
Once in control of Apple again, Mr. Jobs set out to reshape the consumer
electronics industry. He pushed the company into the digital music business,
introducing first iTunes and then the iPod MP3 player. The music arm grew
rapidly, reaching almost 50 percent of the company’s revenue by June 2008.
In 2005, Mr. Jobs announced that he would end Apple’s business relationship with
I.B.M. and Motorola and build Macintosh computers based on Intel
microprocessors.
By then his fight with cancer was publicly known. Apple had announced in 2004
that Mr. Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer and that he had
undergone successful surgery. Four years later, questions about his health
returned when he appeared at a company event looking gaunt. Afterward, he said
he had suffered from a “common bug.” Privately, he said his cancer surgery had
created digestive problems but insisted they were not life-threatening.
Apple began selling the iPhone in June 2007. Mr. Jobs’s goal was to sell 10
million of the handsets in 2008, equivalent to 1 percent of the global cellphone
market. The company sold 11.6 million.
Although smartphones were already commonplace, the iPhone dispensed with a
stylus and pioneered a touch-screen interface that quickly set the standard for
the mobile computing market. Rolled out with much anticipation and fanfare,
iPhone rocketed to popularity; by end of 2010 the company had sold almost 90
million units.
Although Mr. Jobs took just a nominal $1 salary when he returned to Apple, his
compensation became the source of a Silicon Valley scandal in 2006 over the
backdating of millions of shares of stock options. But after a company
investigation and one by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was found
not to have benefited financially from the backdating and no charges were
brought.
The episode did little to taint Mr. Jobs’s standing in the business and
technology world. As the gravity of his illness became known, and particularly
after he announced he was stepping down, he was increasingly hailed for his
genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business
market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic
components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not
been matched.
If he had a motto, it may have come from “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which he
said had deeply influenced him as a young man. The book, he said in his
commencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with the admonition “Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish.”
“I have always wished that for myself,” he said.
Steve Lohr
contributed reporting.
This article
has been revised
to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 5, 2011
An earlier version of this obituary
incorrectly identified the city
where Mr.
Jobs graduated from high school.
It was Cupertino, not Los Altos.
It also
misstated the year
in which NeXT shifted its focus
from the education to the
business market as 1986.
