Steve Jobs — The man who built Apple twice

Steven Paul Jobs (24 February 1955 — 5 October 2011) was a co-founder of Apple and one of the rare executives to have shaped four distinct consumer markets — the personal computer, digital music, the smartphone, and the tablet — from the same chair. Together with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne he founded Apple Computer in 1976 and stood at the centre of the product lineage that ran from the Macintosh (1984) to the original iPhone (2007).

His career splits neatly in two: the founding years at Apple from 1976 to 1985, and the return years from 1997 to 2011. The twelve-year gap between them, spent running NeXT and Pixar, served as the runway for the second act.

Origins and the founding of Apple

Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 to a Syrian immigrant father and an American mother, and was placed for adoption with Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California — soon to be the heart of Silicon Valley. He enrolled at Reed College in 1972, dropped out after a single semester, and audited a calligraphy class whose typographic sensibility he later credited as the seed of the Macintosh's fonts in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

In 1974 Jobs took a technician job at Atari, where he was asked to design the circuit board for the arcade game Breakout. He sub-contracted most of the work to his friend Steve Wozniak. On 1 April 1976 the two of them, with Ronald Wayne, incorporated the Apple Computer Company. The Apple I shipped that year; the Apple II in 1977 brought computers into middle-class American homes and rode the first wave of personal computing.

Apple's December 1980 IPO made the 25-year-old Jobs worth more than $200 million. In January 1984 the original Macintosh launch, heralded by the now-famous Super Bowl "1984" commercial, placed an all-in-one GUI machine with a 3.5-inch floppy drive into the centre of American living rooms.

The exile: NeXT and Pixar

Jobs lost an internal power struggle in 1985. The conflict with CEO John Sculley — the former PepsiCo president whom Jobs had himself recruited — became unresolvable; the board stripped Jobs of operational authority and he resigned that September, aged thirty.

Within months he founded NeXT, Inc. and built the NeXT Cube workstation (1988) along with the NeXTSTEP operating system. NeXT failed commercially — fewer than 50,000 units shipped over its lifetime — but NeXTSTEP earned its place in computing history when Tim Berners-Lee used it at CERN to write the first implementation of the World Wide Web (1989 proposal).

In parallel, Jobs in 1986 bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm from George Lucas for $10 million and spun it out as Pixar Animation Studios. Toy Story (1995) was a runaway hit, and Pixar's IPO the same year made Jobs a billionaire for the first time. Disney acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion in 2006, leaving Jobs as Disney's largest individual shareholder and a board member.

The return and the road to the iPhone

In December 1996 Apple, unable to ship a credible next-generation OS, bought NeXT for roughly $429 million. Jobs returned with it and took over as interim CEO ("iCEO") in September 1997.

The turnaround was executed at remarkable speed. Jobs cut the product matrix to four quadrants — desktop / portable × consumer / professional — and shipped the iMac G3 in 1998, Mac OS X (the NeXTSTEP lineage) in 2001, the iPod that October, and the iTunes Music Store in 2003. Apple was alive again.

Then, on 9 January 2007, at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Jobs unveiled the original iPhone. A capacitive multi-touch display, no physical keyboard, and a full mobile Safari rewrote the smartphone category. The iPad followed in 2010, establishing the tablet market in a way no predecessor had managed.

Management style and criticism

Two things ran in parallel inside Jobs's working method: an intense "reality distortion field" — the gift of insisting the impossible was imminent until it was — and an aggressive style of personnel management. Colleagues' accounts, repeatedly recorded by journalists, describe public humiliations and the casual appropriation of other people's ideas. Walter Isaacson's authorised biography Steve Jobs (2011), produced with Jobs's cooperation, documents that side honestly.

Recurring critiques of his stewardship include (1) labour conditions in Apple's supply chain, especially the suicides and overtime issues at Foxconn's Chinese plants; (2) the stock-option backdating scandal investigated by the SEC in 2006; and (3) a pronounced indifference to organised philanthropy — Jobs shuttered Apple's existing charitable programmes after his return.

Illness and death

In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour (pNET), a rare cancer with a comparatively good prognosis. Doctors recommended surgery; Jobs spent roughly nine months on diet and alternative therapies before agreeing to an operation in July 2004. Whether the delay materially worsened his prognosis remains medically debated, but Jobs himself later told Isaacson it was his "greatest regret".

A liver transplant in 2009 bought him a renewed period of activity, but the disease progressed. He resigned as CEO on 24 August 2011, with Tim Cook taking over, and died on 5 October 2011, aged 56. The official cause of death was respiratory arrest secondary to a metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour.

Legacy

The Apple Jobs left behind became the world's first $1-trillion company in 2018 and the first $3-trillion company in 2022. More than a decade after his death, in 2026, the iPhone, iPad, and Mac still carry the DNA of his second tenure. Bold architectural pivots such as the Apple Silicon M1 transition (2020) — moving from PowerPC to Intel to in-house ARM designs — are direct extensions of Jobs's vertical-integration instinct.

He remains a divisive figure as an organisation builder, but the underlying record — turning computers into mass-market consumer products, and mass-market consumer products into objects of desire — was demonstrated twice through the two Apples he built.