Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson, 2011
He was given up for adoption right after he was born, thrown out of his own company at thirty, and twelve years later he came back and saved it when, by his account, it was less than three months from bankruptcy. Walter Isaacson recorded about forty conversations with Jobs and interviewed more than a hundred people to show honestly both the genius and the tyrant. You’ll see the decisions behind the Macintosh, the iPod and the iPhone, and work out what is worth taking from Jobs’s method and what is better left behind.
Who it is for
For anyone who creates products, leads people or dreams of a business of their own. And for anyone curious about what the man who came up with the iPhone was really like, and why some people worshipped him while others couldn’t stand him.
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?
Abandoned, chosen, special
Steve Jobs was six or seven when the girl next door asked him on the front lawn: “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” The boy ran home in tears. His adoptive parents looked at him seriously and told him several times that they had chosen him specially.
Abandoned, chosen, special: in Walter Isaacson’s view, these three words shaped Jobs’s whole personality. His friends saw that early loss as the root of his lifelong urge to control everything. Jobs himself disagreed with them: he had never felt abandoned, he said, but he had always seen himself as special. He took one more thing from his childhood. His father, the mechanic Paul Jobs, taught him to finish even the back of a fence or a cabinet with care, though no one would ever see it.
Isaacson had written for Time and had already published biographies of Franklin and Einstein when Jobs himself asked him to write the book and promised not to read the manuscript. The author recorded about forty conversations with him and interviewed more than a hundred friends, enemies and colleagues. Jobs said he wanted to stand where his hero Edwin Land of Polaroid had stood: at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences.
Isaacson doesn’t turn his subject into a role model. Jobs could both infuriate and upset the people around him. But in the author’s view, every one of his inventions shows both the strengths and the flaws of his character. Ahead are seven turning-point decisions, from his parents’ garage to his last board meeting. Let’s see what is worth taking from them and what is better left to him.
A brilliant circuit board isn’t a product yet
In 1975 Steve Wozniak typed a few letters on the keyboard of his homemade computer and saw them appear on the screen. He planned to give the schematics away for free at the meetings of an electronics hobbyist club. Twenty-year-old Jobs suggested something else: make the boards and sell them. Even earlier there had been the blue box, a device for free long-distance calls, and the roles in their friendship were already set: Wozniak comes up with a brilliant thing, and Jobs works out how to present it and sell it.
The first order came from the owner of a computer store: 50 computers at 500 dollars each, but only fully assembled ones. The friends soldered them in Jobs’s parents’ house. Then, at a 1976 fair, Jobs saw a competitor, the SOL-20, in a shiny metal case. Technically the Apple I was stronger, but it looked as sloppy as its makers.
That led to the decision that started the real Apple. The next computer, the Apple II, would be ready to work straight out of the box: case, keyboard, power supply, software. For every hobbyist, Jobs reasoned, there are a thousand people who just want to switch it on and get to work. He came up with the streamlined case of light plastic while looking at a food processor in a department store. He got rid of the fan because, in his view, it was distracting and went against the spirit of Zen, and to do without it an engineer built a switching power supply that heated up less. Jobs even rejected the first layout of the circuit board, which no buyer would ever see, because its lines weren’t straight enough.
The money and the rules came from Mike Markkula, a former Intel manager. His “Apple Marketing Philosophy” rested on three ideas. Empathy: understanding the customer’s feelings better than any other company. Focus: dropping everything secondary. And “impute”: people, Markkula wrote, really do judge a book by its cover, and a sloppy presentation will spoil their opinion of even the best product. Jobs later admitted that his attention to packaging, down to the feel of the iPhone box, came from Mike.
The Apple II stayed on the market for sixteen years, and about six million machines were sold in all. The circuits were Wozniak’s work of genius, but, as the adman Regis McKenna put it, without Jobs those circuits would have gathered dust on the shelves of hobbyist shops. If you carry this story over to your own work, it helps to ask: what will a person have to do on their own before my thing starts working for them?
About the author
Walter Isaacson is an American journalist and biographer who worked at Time magazine and at CNN, and the author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. He wrote the book about Jobs at Jobs’s own request.
All books by this author: Walter Isaacson
Terms from the book
- Zen
- Empathy
- Picasso
- NeXT
- Lucas
- Pixar
- Lasseter
- Grove
- Newton
- Johnson
- Rubinstein
- Schiller
- Gates
- Levinson
- Stanford
- Cook
- Paul Jobs: Steve Jobs’s adoptive father, a mechanic who repaired and sold used cars himself.
- Land: Edwin Land, an American inventor, founder of Polaroid and one of Jobs’s heroes.
- Wozniak: Steve Wozniak, an engineer who founded Apple together with Jobs and built the Apple I and Apple II computers.
- Blue box: A homemade device that imitated the phone network’s signals and let you call other cities and countries for free. Wozniak and Jobs built and sold these devices.
- SOL-20: A 1976 personal computer, a rival to Apple’s first computer, made in a metal case with a keyboard.
- Switching power supply: A power supply that switches on and off thousands of times a second. It heats up less and works more efficiently than an ordinary one.
- Markkula: Mike Markkula, a former Intel manager and Apple’s first major investor, who advised Jobs for many years and was part of the company’s leadership.
- McKenna: Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley advertising and public relations specialist who worked with Apple for many years.
- Xerox PARC: Xerox’s research center in Palo Alto, where a graphical interface with windows, folders and a mouse was developed in the 1970s.
- Graphical user interface: A way of controlling a computer with windows, icons and a mouse instead of typing text commands.
- Tribble: Bud Tribble, a programmer on the original Macintosh team.
- Reality distortion field: What Jobs’s colleagues called his ability to convince himself and others of anything, even of something that seemed impossible. The phrase comes from the series Star Trek and is not a scientific term.
- Hertzfeld: Andy Hertzfeld, a programmer on the original Macintosh team and a close friend of Jobs.
- Hoffman: Joanna Hoffman, a member of the original Macintosh team who wasn’t afraid to argue with Jobs.
- Kilobytes: Units of computer memory, each about a thousand bytes.
- Sculley: John Sculley, the head of Pepsi-Cola, whom Jobs invited to run Apple in 1983. In 1985 the board backed Sculley in his conflict with Jobs.
- Tin Toy: A 1988 Pixar short, the first computer-animated film to win an Oscar.
- Ive: Jony Ive, a British designer and Apple’s head of design, who created the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad together with Jobs.
- iMac: Apple’s 1998 home computer, with the monitor and the computer itself combined in one case.
- Dotcom bubble: The sharp rise and then crash of internet companies’ stock prices in 2000 and 2001.
- Playlist: A list of songs that a player plays one after another.
- iTunes: Apple’s music software, and later the online iTunes Store, where songs were sold one at a time.
- Walkman: Sony’s famous portable player.
- Psychic: A person who claims to be able to communicate with spirits and receive knowledge from them.
- Metastases: New tumor sites that appear far from the original one, in other organs.
All terms
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