Steve Jobs: The Essential Biography
The rise, fall, and return of Apple’s co-founder, and the story behind Pixar and the iPhone
20 chapters · 230 pages · EPUB & PDF
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Most of what people repeat about Jobs comes from the legend: two friends inventing an industry in a garage, a raid on Xerox, a lone genius behind every product. The documented record tells a different story and explains more about how he worked.
This book traces Jobs from his adoption in 1955 to his death in 2011 and keeps three things apart: what he did, what others did, and what was added afterward. You come away knowing where his judgment made the difference and where it cost him.
Wozniak did most of the Apple I engineering in his apartment and at Hewlett-Packard; the Jobs garage was where boards were tested and prepared for delivery. The 1979 visits to Xerox PARC were part of a deal that let Xerox buy 100,000 Apple shares for about $1 million. In June 1997, a filing showed Jobs had sold all but one of his Apple shares, three months before he became its interim chief executive.
Each chapter ends with the interviews, filings and press reports it rests on, so the Jobs you finish with is one you can account for, including the daughter he denied and the computers that failed to sell.
Questions about this book
Does the book cover Pixar and Toy Story?
Yes. Two chapters follow Pixar from Jobs’s 1986 purchase of Lucasfilm’s Computer Division through the 1993 Black Friday story screening at Disney to the 1995 Toy Story release and stock offering.
Does the book discuss his illness and how Apple prepared for life without him?
Yes. It covers his 2003 diagnosis, the delayed surgery, the 2009 liver transplant, and how Tim Cook ran daily operations during his leaves before becoming CEO in August 2011.
What does the book do when its sources disagree?
It names the disagreement and gives each figure. Isaacson shows Mike Markkula’s roughly $250,000 investment as $80,000 equity and $170,000 loan, while other accounts differ. The paternity test reads 94.1 percent in Time and 94.4 percent in Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir.
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