Editor of Possibility
He brought technology, liberal arts and fierce editorial judgment into the same room, asking teams to make complex machines feel direct and human.
Entrepreneur & Product Editor
Adopted and raised in Silicon Valley, Jobs encountered electronics, counterculture, calligraphy and the emerging personal-computer community.
In 1976 he co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Wozniak engineered the Apple I; Jobs saw how a product, company and story might bring it to people.
Apple II made the young company consequential. Jobs later took over the Macintosh group and pushed for an integrated graphical computer with unusual attention to typography and industrial design.
The Macintosh was a collective work. Jobs’s distinctive role was to edit, provoke and hold the whole experience together.
After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT and acquired the computer-graphics group that became Pixar. Both ventures struggled before their work found its durable form.
NeXT software became the technical foundation of modern Apple operating systems; Pixar proved computer animation could serve character and story.
Returning to a near-bankrupt Apple, Jobs narrowed its product line and rebuilt operations with leaders including Jony Ive and Tim Cook.
The iMac, iPod, Apple Stores and iTunes formed a connected experience rather than isolated products.
iPhone joined a phone, internet communicator and multi-touch computer; iPad followed with a larger canvas. Thousands of engineers, designers and partners made those systems real.
Jobs resigned as CEO in August 2011 and died on 5 October. His archive preserves his evolving words, including failures and revisions as well as launches.
2023 · Steve Jobs in his own words
Speeches, interviews and correspondence · Edited by Leslie BerlinRead free2005 · Stanford commencement address
Three stories about work, loss and mortalityRead the address1983 · International Design Conference in Aspen
Jobs on computers, design and the objects people live withExplore the archive
Bill AtkinsonThe Macintosh shaped through an intense designer–engineer collaboration
Alan KayThe personal computer imagined as a medium for everyone
George LucasPixar emerged from the meeting of story, tools and patient institution-building
