Steve Jobs

launching a startup in his parents’ garage and building it into the world’s most valuable company. He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. As a result he launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole industries:
    • The Apple II, which took Wozniak’s circuit board and turned it into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.
    • The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphical user interfaces.
    •
Toy Story
and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle of digital imagination.
    • Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.
    • The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.
    • The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.
    • The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email, and web devices.
    • The App Store, which spawned a new content-creation industry.
    • The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.
    • iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our content and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.
    • And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on earth.
    Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.
    Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world’s most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, andimagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.
    And One More Thing . . .
    Biographers are supposed to have the last word. But this is a biography of Steve Jobs. Even though he did not impose his legendary desire for control on this project, I suspect that I would not be conveying the right feel for him—the way he asserted himself in any situation—if I just shuffled him onto history’s stage without letting him have some last words.
    Over the course of our conversations, there were many times when he reflected on what he hoped his legacy would be. Here are those thoughts, in his own words:
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the