This is a Tribute to Steve Jobs. A man who changed our lives forever.
"People don't just want to buy personal computers anymore, they want to know what they can do with them."
— Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computer
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet."
— Steve Jobs
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." — Steve Jobs. BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998.
"The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."
— Steve Jobs. Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company, by Owen W. Linzmayer.
"Nobody has tried to swallow us since I've been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste."
— Steve Jobs. Apple shareholder meeting, April 22, 1998.
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"
— Steve Jobs. The line he used to lure John Sculley as Apple's CEO, according to Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley and John Byrne.
"I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year.... It's very character-building."
— Steve Jobs. Apple Confidential 2.0.
"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
— Steve Jobs, on Mac OS X's Aqua user interface (Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000).
"There are sneakers that cost more than an iPod."
— Steve Jobs, on the iPod's $300 price tag, Newsweek, Oct. 27, 2003.
"It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can't overestimate it!"
— Steve Jobs, on the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), Fortune, May 12, 2003.
"What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the internet — and no one's gonna shut down the internet."
— Steve Jobs, on how he sold iTMS to the music industry, Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003.
"iMac is next year's computer for $1,299, not last year's computer for $999."
— Steve Jobs. iMac introduction in Cupertino, Calif., May 6, 1998.
"The G4 Cube is simply the coolest computer ever. An entirely new class of computer, it marries the Pentium-crushing performance of the Power Mac G4 with the miniaturization, silent operation and elegant desktop design of the iMac. It is an amazing engineering and design feat, and we're thrilled to finally unveil it to our customers."
— Steve Jobs. Macworld Expo, July 19, 2000.
"I think Pixar has the opportunity to be the next Disney — not replace Disney — but be the next Disney."
— Steve Jobs. BusinessWeek, Nov. 23, 1998.
"Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works."
— Steve Jobs. New York Times. 2003.
"I could be doing a lot of other things with my life, but the Macintosh is going to change the world. I believe that, and I've chosen people for the team who believe it, too"
— Steve Jobs.
"I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next."
— Steve Jobs. NBC Nightly News, 2006.
"Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains."
— Steve Jobs, Business Week, 1998
"We make tools for people. Tools to create, tools to communicate. The age we're living in, these tools surprise you.... That's why I love what we do. Because we make these tools, and we're constantly surprised with what people do with them."
— Steve Jobs, D5 Conference: All Things Digital, 2007
"I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley for the most part at that time was still orchards--apricot orchards and prune orchards--and it was really paradise. I remember the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other...It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up."
— Steve Jobs, Playboy, 1960
"The first computer I ever saw was at Hewlett-Packard. They used to invite maybe 10 of us down every Tuesday night and give us lectures and let us work with a computer. I was maybe 12 the first time. I remember the night. They showed us one of their new desktop computers and let us play on it. I wanted one badly."
— Steve Jobs, Playboy, 1960
"From almost the beginning at Apple we were, for some incredibly lucky reason, fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time. The contributions we tried to make embodied values not only of technical excellence and innovation — which I think we did our share of — but innovation of a more humanistic kind."
— Steve Jobs, Smithsonian, 1995
"Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world..."
— Steve Jobs, 1996
"It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important."
— Steve Jobs, Business Week, 2004
"Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you ... the minute that you understand that you can poke life ... that you can change it, you can mould it ... that's maybe the most important thing."
— Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs ...Mahalo!
Since I bought my first little Apple Macintosh in 1985 to my present iMac and MacBook Pro ...I have been on an incredible journey with Steve. As a result of years of personal growth with my Macs, my life has changed forever, thanks to you, Steve. Everyday, on my Macs has been a day with you. A day filled with anticipation, growth, and joy. Steve, you have been an inspiration to me like no one else I have ever known. Thank you so much for making a huge difference in my life. Through Apple products, I have awesome tools to help me better the lives of others around the world. I and all Apple enthusiasts worldwide will miss you dearly.
With warmest Aloha and Love... Mahalo!
Lorrin L. Lee, proud Mac Entrepreneur
Steve Paul Jobs, born February 24, 1955, is the co-founder of Apple Inc. He was born in San Francisco and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California...who name him Steven Paul. Job's biological parents are Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian graduate student who later became a political science professor, and Joanne Simpson, an American graduate student who went on to become a speech language pathologist. They later married, and gave birth to Jobs' biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson.
Jobs graduated from high school and attended Reed College in Oregon. He dropped out after one semester, though he audited a class in calligraphy. He stated that, "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."
Prior to co-founding Apple, Steve Wozniack was an electronics hacker. Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial, titled "1984." The Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984. It became the first commerically successful small computer with a graphical user interface.
Jobs has always aspired to position Apple and its products at the forefront of the information technology industry by foreseeing and setting trends, at least in innovation and style. He summed up that self-concept at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007 by quoting ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will. — Steve Jobs.
Jobs is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in over 230 awarded patents or patent applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages.
Jobs married Laurene Powell, on March 18, 1991. Zen Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa presided over their wedding. They have a son, Reed Paul Jobs and two other children. Jobs also has a daughter, Lisa Brennan-jobs (born 1978), from his relationship with painter Chrisann Brennan.
Jobs is also a Beatles fan. He has referenced them on more than one occasion at Keynotes and also was interviewed on a showing of a Paul McCartney concert. When asked about his business model on 60 Minutes, he replied:
My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.
He usually wears a black long-sleeved mock turtleneck made by St. Croix, Levi's 501 blue jeans, and New Balance 991 sneakers. He is a pescetarian, a diet which includes fish but no meat. His choice of car is a silver 2006 Mercedes SL 55 AMG, which has no licence plates.
On October 6, 1997, in a Gartner Symposium, when Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he owned then-troubled Apple Computer, he said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." In 2006, Steve Jobs sent an email to all employees when Apple's market capitalization rose above Dell's. The email read: Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.
So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 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. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.
I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.
I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.
It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.
Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs
Honors bestowed upon Steve Jobs
He was awarded the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan in 1984 with Steve Wozniak (among the first people to ever receive the honor), and a Jefferson Award for Public Service in the category "Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under" (aka the Samuel S. Beard Award) in 1987.
On November 27, 2007, Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune Magazine.
On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Jobs into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.
In August 2009, Jobs was selected the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers on a survey by Junior Achievement.
On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune Magazine.
In November 2009 Jobs was ranked #57 on Forbes: The World's Most Powerful People.
In December 2010, the Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010, ending its essay by stating, "In his autobiography, John Sculley, the former PepsiCo executive who once ran Apple, said this of the ambitions of the man he had pushed out: 'Apple was supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company. This was a lunatic plan. High-tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product.' How wrong can you be".
This and more videos were created on an Apple iMac with iMovie. Thanks, Steve.
"I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do."
— Steve Jobs. BusinessWeek Online, Oct. 12, 2004
"We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It's pretty great."
— Steve Jobs. Apple Worldwide Conference, 2004
"John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place -- which was making great computers for people to use."
— Steve Jobs. The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program oral history, April 20, 1995.
"I think Pixar has the opportunity to be the next Disney – not replace Disney – but be the next Disney."
— Steve Jobs. BusinessWeek, Nov. 23, 1998.
"We believe it's the biggest advance in animation since Walt Disney started it all with the release of Snow White 50 years ago."
— Steve Jobs, on Toy Story, Fortune, Sept. 18, 1995.
"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
— Steve Jobs, on Mac OS X's Aqua user interface (Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000).
"It'll make your jaw drop.."
— Steve Jobs, on the first NeXT Computer, in The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1989.
"It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans."
— Steve Jobs, on Apple's lawsuit following his resignation to form NeXT (Newsweek, Sept. 30, 1985).
"My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT, and I wonder about Apple."
— Steve Jobs. Fortune, Aug. 26, 1991.
"Why would I ever want to run Disney? Wouldn't it make more sense just to sell them Pixar and retire?"
— Steve Jobs. Fortune, Feb. 23, 2004.
"The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful."
— Steve Jobs. Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003.
"Steve has a power of vision that is almost frightening. When Steve believes in something, the power of that vision can literally sweep aside any objections, problems or whatever. They just cease to exist."
— Trip Hawkins, Mac engineer.
"Whether you're leading a free workshop, teaching a One to One personal training session or giving expert technical advice at the Genius Bar, there's one thing you'll definitely see — people's faces light up when you show them something they never knew they could do. You'll get used to it, but you'll never get tired of it."
— Apple online recruiting copy.
"I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
— Steve Jobs. Newsweek, 2006
"Steve has always approached everything with the same energy and detail. He's taken the same attitude he has toward product and design and applied it to management."
— Regis McKenna, marketing executive
"The Mac team had a complicated set of motivations, but the most unique ingredient was a strong dose of artistic values. The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money; it was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater."
— Andy Hertzfeld, Mac design team member
"We're constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. ...And frankly, we don't settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change."
— Jay Elliot, former Senior VP of Apple
A reporter who asked Jobs about the market research that went into the iPad was famously told, "None. It's not the customer's job to know what they want." "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
"Being the riches man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. ...Going to be at night saying we've don't something wonderful ...that's what matters to me."
— Steve Jobs, Wall Street Journal, 1993
"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network." "We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people -- as remarkable as the telephone."
— Steve Jobs, Playboy, 1985
"If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I'll feel I have lost Apple. But if I'm a million miles away, and all those people still feel those things...then I will feel that my genes are still there."
— Steve Jobs, Newsweek, September 29, 1985
"A computer is the most incredible tool we've ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have no idea how far it's going to go. Right now, computers make our lives easier. They do work for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. They increase the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some of that by broadening our possibilities. As things progress, they'll be doing more and more for us...."
— Steve Jobs, 1985
"He is on a mission, preaching the gospel of salvation through the personal computer--preferably one manufactured by Apple. He is an engaging pitchman and never loses an opportunity to sell his products, eloquently describing a time when computers will be as common as kitchen appliances and as revolutionary in their impact as the telephone or the internal-combustion engine."
— Playboy, 1985
"I was basically fired from Apple when I was 30, and was invited to come back 12 years later. That was difficult when it happened, but maybe the best thing that ever happened to me."
— Steve Jobs, 1985
"iMac comes from the marriage of the excitement of the Internet with the simplicity of Macintosh."
— Steve Jobs, 1998
"It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts, humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing. And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices."
— Steve Jobs, 2011
"I actually think there's actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest caliber...They've just been to me people who pursue different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal, which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it."
— Steve Jobs, 2011
"I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."
— Steve Jobs, 2011
Steve Paul Jobs, born February 24, 1955, is the co-founder of Apple Inc. He was born in San Francisco and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California...who name him Steven Paul. Job's biological parents are Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian graduate student who later became a political science professor, and Joanne Simpson, an American graduate student who went on to become a speech language pathologist. They later married, and gave birth to Jobs' biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson. 
