Steve Jobs (2011) is an authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson about the life of the late Apple founder and tech revolutionary. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs, the book is an in-depth exploration of who Jobs was, from the story of his birth and subsequent adoption to his massive success at the helm of Apple. Jobs himself personally requested that Isaacson write his biography on a phone call in 2004. By the time the book was published seven years later, Isaacson and Jobs had formed a special bond. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller and was later adapted into a feature film in 2015 starring Michael Fassbender with a screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin.

Summary

Isaacson introduces the book by describing how Jobs called him in 2004, requesting that he write his biography. Jobs was born to two graduate students who gave him up for adoption. His birth parents were adamant their son be raised by college graduates who would make his education a priority. Upon learning more about Paul and Clara Jobs, Steve’s adoptive parents, they agreed to allow the couple to adopt the boy with the promise that they would fund Steve’s education. Paul Jobs was a member of the US Coast Guard during the Second World War. His wife, Clara, was the daughter of Armenian refugees who fled the region during the Turkish conflict. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1952. The narrative then shifts to Jobs’s biological parents. His biological mother, Joanne Schieble, was a devout Catholic who fell in love with Abdulfattah Jandali, a teaching assistant from Syria. As her father forbade them to marry and abortion was frowned upon in their strict Catholic community, the couple decided to give their infant son up for adoption.

Isaacson chronicles Jobs’s relationship with his business partner and co-creator of Apple, Steve Wozniak (Woz). The two met while attending the same electronics class and soon realized that their ideas and goals were similar. Before long, the two developed a lasting friendship and a working relationship that would revolutionize the technology industry for decades to come.

Chrisann Brennan became Jobs’s first girlfriend in 1972. Around this time, Jobs began experimenting with various changes to his lifestyle, including an exploration of vegetarianism and LSD. Jobs also entered college in 1972. His adoptive parents tried to convince him to attend Stanford or Berkeley, but Jobs had his eyes set on Reed College.

Jobs attended undergraduate school for two years until, in 1974, he left Reed College and began looking for work. Eventually, he landed a job at Atari. The author illustrates the somewhat flamboyant attitude that would follow Jobs throughout his life by recounting an instance at Atari where Jobs barged in and demanded he be hired. His attitude ostracized Jobs from the Atari culture; his supervisors relegated him to the night shift because of his body odor and the fact that no one wanted to work with him. However, Jobs’s time at Atari provided the blueprint for what would become a lifelong appreciation for mingling simplicity with elegant design.

The cultural climate of the early-mid 1970s had as much influence on Jobs as did his stints at various companies. Working at Hewlett-Packard gave him access to the resources and brainpower needed to perfect his initial designs. During this time, dissension began among the Apple co-founders, specifically Wozniak, whose father was concerned that his son would not receive the same equity and esteem as Jobs.

Notable in Jobs’s life at the start of Apple’s rise in the tech industry was Steve’s refusal to embrace his own daughter Lisa, who Chrisann had given birth to in 1978. Jobs denied he was the father, and ultimately was only convinced when a DNA test proved his paternity. Eventually, he would go on to have three more children during his marriage to Laurene Powell.

Despite personal and professional setbacks, Apple Computers skyrocketed in brand recognition and usability with the launch of the first Mac in 1984. Although the company experienced an initial loss of sales due to the ubiquity and market share of IBM, Jobs’s ingenuity and creative prowess provided the springboard for a marketing campaign that drastically increased the company’s popularity.

After chronicling the meteoric success that Apple would experience through the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, Isaacson concludes the book by reiterating Jobs’s position as one of the great innovators of the twentieth century.