Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781982176860
• eBook ISBN: 9781451648553
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

Walter Isaacson’s “enthralling” (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in 21st century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Steve Jobs is the inspiration for the movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Characters
• Introduction: How This Book Came to Be
• Chapter One: Childhood: Abandoned and Chosen
• Chapter Two: Odd Couple: The Two Steves
• Chapter Three: The Dropout: Turn On, Tune In…
• Chapter Four: Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design
• Chapter Five: The Apple I: Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In…
• Chapter Six: The Apple II: Dawn of a New Age
• Chapter Seven: Chrisann and Lisa: He Who Is Abandoned…
• Chapter Eight: Xerox and Lisa: Graphical User Interfaces
• Chapter Nine: Going Public: A Man of Wealth and Fame
• Chapter Ten: The Mac Is Born: You Say You Want a Revolution
• Chapter Eleven: The Reality Distortion Field: Playing by His Own Set of Rules
• Chapter Twelve: The Design: Real Artists Simplify
• Chapter Thirteen: Building the Mac: The Journey Is the Reward
• Chapter Fourteen: Enter Sculley: The Pepsi Challenge
• Chapter Fifteen: The Launch: A Dent in the Universe
• Chapter Sixteen: Gates and Jobs: When Orbits Intersect
• Chapter Seventeen: Icarus: What Goes Up…
• Chapter Eighteen: Next: Prometheus Unbound
• Chapter Nineteen: Pixar: Technology Meets Art
• Chapter Twenty: A Regular Guy: Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word
• Chapter Twenty-One: Family Man: At Home with the Jobs Clan
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Toy Story: Buzz and Woody to the Rescue
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Second Coming: What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last…
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The Restoration: The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Think Different: Jobs as iCEO
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: The iMac: Hello (Again)
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Ceo: Still Crazy after All These Years
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Apple Stores: Genius Bars and Siena Sandstone
• Chapter Thirty: The Digital Hub: From iTunes to the iPod
• Chapter Thirty-One: The Itunes Store: I’m the Pied Piper
• Chapter Thirty-Two: Music Man: The Sound Track of His Life
• Chapter Thirty-Three: Pixar’s Friends: … and Foes
• Chapter Thirty-Four: Twenty-First-Century Macs: Setting Apple Apart
• Chapter Thirty-Five: Round One: Memento Mori
• Chapter Thirty-Six: The iPhone: Three Revolutionary Products in One
• Chapter Thirty-Seven: Round Two: The Cancer Recurs
• Chapter Thirty-Eight: The iPad: Into the Post-PC Era
• Chapter Thirty-Nine: New Battles: And Echoes of Old Ones
• Chapter Forty: To Infinity: The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond
• Chapter Forty-One: Round Three: The Twilight Struggle
• Chapter Forty-Two: Legacy: The Brightest Heaven of Invention
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Sources
• Notes
• Index
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright