x dismiss this message
Did you know you can edit this page?
-
Sign Into Shelfari
-
Choose something to edit
-
Save your contributions
see page history
Description edit
From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Summary edit
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
People edit
- Steve Jobs: The co-founder of Apple Inc. He was born in 1955 and died in 2011. Biological mother was from Wisconsin; biological father was a Syrian Muslilm. Adopted by a couple from San Francisco, CA and named Steven Paul Jobs.
- Tim Cook: The former Operations Chief of Apple Inc. who took over as CEO in August 2011, shortly before Jobs died of cancer.
- Steve Wozniak: Co-founder of Apple Inc.; Engineer. Met Jobs while Jobs was still in high school and the two clicked.
- Laurene Jobs: Steve Jobs' wife and mother of three of his children. (nee Powell)
- Al Alcorn: Chief engineer at Atari, who designed Pong.
- Gil Amelio: Became CEO of Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back.
- Bill Atkinson: Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh. Responsible for the ability to move "windows" around on the screen (with overlap, some hidden etc.) and for flowing graphics onscreen and for trackball mice.
- Chrisann Brennan: Jobs's girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa.
- Lisa Brennan-Jobs: Daugher of Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer in New York City.
- Nolan Bushnell: Founder of Atari and entrepreneurial role model for Jobs.
- Bill Campbell: Apple marketing chief during Jobs's first stint at Apple and board member and confidante after Jobs's return in 1997.
- Robert Friedland: Reed student, proprietor of an apple farm commune, and spiritual seeker who influenced Jobs, then went on to run a mining company.
- Joanna Hoffman: Worked on the original Mac team. Was one of the few people with the courage to really stand up to Jobs.
- Jonathan "Jony" Ive: Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs's partner and confidante.
- Mike Markkula: First big Apple investor and chairman, one of Steve's father figures.
- Arthur Rock: Legendary tech investor and early Apple board member. Another father figure for Jobs.
- John Sculley: Former Pepsi exec whom Jobs brought into be CEO of Apple who later was instrumental in ousting Jobs from his own company. Good at marketing.
- Larry Ellison: Neighbor and best friend. Oracle CEO
- Dada: Editor
- Mona Simpson: Sister of Steve Jobs and successful author. Steve reconnects with her as an adult after he seeks out his birth mother.
- John Lasseter: Cofounder and chief creative officer of Pixar.
- Paul Reinhold Jobs: Jobs's father, adopted Jobs in 1955; former Coast Guard; worked for International Harvester, as a used car salesman, and as a repo man. Very mechanically inclined. Very muched influenced Steve's attention to detail.
- Clara Jobs: Jobs's mother, adopted Jobs in 1955; was married once before prior to marrying Paul Jobs. Worked as a bookkeeper.
- Larry Lang: One of the Jobs's neighbors who was an engineer at HP. Showed Jobs a carbon microphone that didn't have an amplifier.
- Emma Jean "Teddy" Hill: Jobs's fourth grade advanced class teacher who recognized Jobs's potential and found a way to inspire him to learn.
- Ron Wayne: Atari employee who was friends with Jobs in Jobs's early days with Atari. Originally a 10% owner of Apple Computers. Sold his 10% share early on in the history of Apple. Created the original logo for Apple.
- Daniel Kottke: Friend of Jobs at Reed College. Shared Jobs's interest in Buddhism. Helped with assembly in the early days of Apple Computers.
- Elizabeth Holmes: Kottke's girlfriend. Sometimes cooked for Jobs during college. Also into the Eastern religion movement. Early bookkeeper for Apple Computers.
- Regis McKenna: Early PR person hired by Apple to get the word out about their products. Frank Burge was Apple's first contact with the PR firm. Created the new logo for Apple.
- Jef Raskin: Wanted to develop an all inclusive computer with a graphical interface. Professor to Atkinson. Worked on the MacIntosh.
- Bill Gates: Microsoft CEO.
- Avie Tevanian: Software engineer and "buddy" from NeXT
- David Winchell: This is an intimate look into the life of a legend. Great book. Very well written.
- Powell: Add a description of this character.
- Bob Dylan
- Katzenberg
- Rubinstein
- Woolard
- Bono
- Reed
- Smith
- Murdoch
- Eisner
- Catmull
- Bob Iger: Disney CEO who engineered merger of Disney with Pixar.
- Perot
- Johnson
- Lee Clow: Principal at the ad agency TBWA-Chiat-Day
- Woody
- Levinson
- Joanne
- Gassée
- Erin
Quotes edit
-
“You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.”
Steve Jobs -
“In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you."”
An old Hindu saying Jobs used on the invitations to his 30th birthday bash -
““Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.””
Steve Jobs -
“"Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth."”
Scott Adams -
“"I'm going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and i want you to be in every single one because you'll learn more in those two days than you would in two years at business school." <Note: Wouldn't that work out to be 24/2?>”
Steve Jobs -
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Leonardo da Vinci -
“I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on. The he paused for a second and he said 'yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone.' He said—and paused again, and he said, "And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”
Steve Jobs -
“Jobs grilled him (Ron Wayne): “When you see a beautiful woman, what do you feel?” Wayne replied, “It’s like when you look at a beautiful horse. You can appreciate it, but you don’t want to sleep with it. You appreciate beauty for what it is.” Wayne said that it is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to him.”
Steve Jobs & Ron Wayne -
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
Steve Jobs -
““People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.””
Mike Markkula -
“"There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important."”
Walter Isaacson
Setting & Locations edit
- San Francisco, CA: The town Steve was born in.
- Cupertino, CA: Headquarters of Apple Inc.
- Portland, OR: Where Jobs attended, and later dropped out of, Reed College
- Carlyle Hotel: Frequent location of early Apple PR interviews.
- Palo Alto: California city where Jobs lives and where Isaacson sometimes had interviews with Jobs.
- Mountainview: A suburb of Palo Alto where Jobs grew up. Jobs helped his father build a fence on this property. They moved from here when Jobs was in middle school.
- California
- New York
- India
- Hawaii
- Woodside
- Silicon Valley
- Los Angeles
- Berkeley
- Stanford
- Belleville
- Japan
- London
- Paris
- Manhattan
- America
- San Jose
- United States
- Mac
- France
- Washington
- Wisconsin
- Los Altos
- China
- Europe
- Memphis
- Homestead High
- Moscow
- Kyoto
- Zen Buddhism
- Kona Village
- Chicago
- Amazon
- Wall Street Journal
- Beatles
- Italy
- Dublin
- Hollywood
- Egypt
- Rio
- Florence
Organizations edit
- Apple Inc.: The company Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak started in 1976.
- Pixar: The computer graphic design business that Jobs purchased, which became famous for movies such as: Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo. Jobs owned part of Pixar in its early days.
- Atari: Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
- Microsoft Corporation: Started out writing software for Apple and IBM. Became a competitor of Apple Inc. using the software written for IBM.
- Xerox Corporation: Had a research center in Palo Alto, CA known as Xerox-PARC. Wanted to create a small computer with a graphic user interface (GUI) rather than DOS prompts. Bitmap system used to create gorgeous display. Xerox venture capital wanted to be part of Apple in 1979. Apple got to see technology at Xerox in exchange for Xerox buying 1 million shares. Apple used many of these ideas in their MacIntosh design.
- Intel: Integrated Technology Corp. one of the early makers of semiconductors. Also one of the first companies to make a microprocessor.
- Walt Disney Company: Disney struck up a production deal with Pixar because wanted John Lasseter back. John Lasseter was trained by Disney and went to work for Lucasfilm/Pixar after Disney's workplace didn't prove a good fit for him.
- Pepsi-Cola Bottling: Company Scully worked for when Jobs recruited him to Apple Inc.
- Oracle: Engineers hardware and software that work together.
- NeXT Computer: Company Jobs started after leaving Apple Inc. Company was later purchased by Apple Inc. to bring Jobs back to Apple.
- IBM (International Business Machines): Marketed an early personal computer (PC). Often called "Big Blue".
- TBWA\Chiat\Day: Lee Clow's Advertising firm primarily responsible for Apple's success from late 90's into the 21st century.
- Power Computing: One of the companies to which Apple licensed the Mac OS for producing non-branded hardware in the late 1990's.
- Dream Works: Add a description of this organization.
First Sentence edit
In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs.
Table of Contents edit
Characters
Introduction: How this book came to be
Chapter One
Childhood
Chapter Two
Odd Couple
Chapter Three
The Dropout
Chapter Four
Atari and India
Chapter Five
The Apple I
Chapter Six
The Apple II
Chapter Seven
Chrisann and Lisa
Chapter Eight
Xerox and Lisa
Chapter Nine
Going Public
Chapter Ten
The Mac is Born
Chapter Eleven
The Reality Distortion Field
Chapter Twelve
The Design
Chapter Thirteen
Building the Mac
Chapter Fourteen
Enter Sculley
Chapter Fifteen
The Launch
Chapter Sixteen
Gates and Jobs
Chapter Seventeen
Icarus
Chapter Eighteen
NeXT
Chapter Nineteen
Pixar
Chapter Twenty
A Regular Guy
Chapter Twenty-One
Family Man
Chapter Twenty-Two
Toy Story
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Second Coming
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Restoration
Chapter Twenty-Five
Think Different
Chapter Twenty-Six
Design Principles
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The iMac
Chapter Twenty-Eight
CEO
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Apple Stores
Chapter Thirty
The Digital Hub
Chapter Thirty-One
The iTunes Store
Chapter Thirty-Two
Music Man
Chapter Thirty-Three
Pixar's Friends
Chapter Thirty-Four
Twenty-first-century Macs
Chapter Thirty-Five
Round One
Chapter Thirty-Six
The iPhone
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Round Two
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The iPad
Chapter Thirty-Nine
New Battles
Chapter Forty
To Infinity
Chapter Forty-One
Round Three
Chapter Forty-Two
Legacy
Glossary edit
- lapidary: characterized by an exactitude and extreme refinement
- memento mori: An object serving as a warning or reminder of death.
- zeitgeist: The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.
Themes & Symbolism edit
- Regret: Describe this theme.
- Genius
- Innovation, Creativity, Ideas: Combining Technology with Real life in a way that creates items people want to buy
- Abandonment: Jobs being abandoned at birth and knowing from an early age that he was adopted is theorized by many of his friends and colleagues as the reason for some of Jobs's behaviors.
- List of his loves: He had his share of loves as the author describes.
Series & Lists edit
This is book 8 of 15 in New York Times Bestsellers - Nonfiction (Current). (authoritative list)
Preceded by The Vow: The True Story Behind the Movie, and followed by Killing Lincoln.
This is book 1 of 16 in New York Times Bestsellers - Hardcover Nonfiction (Current). (authoritative list)
Followed by Killing Lincoln.
This book is in Amazon.com Best Books of 2011. (authoritative list)
This is book 1 of 10 in Amazon.com Best Books of November (2011). (authoritative list)
Followed by Catherine the Great.
Authors & Contributors edit
- Walter Isaacson (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Country: United States
Publication Date: October, 24 2011
ISBN: 1451648537
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Country: United States
Publication Date: October, 24 2011
ISBN: 1451648537
Page Count: 656
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 338
Subjects edit
Popular Tags
See all 50 tags
Links to Supplemental Material edit
- The New York Times: A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs
- Apple Memorial
Books with Additional Background Information edit
Amazon Customers Who Bought This Book Also Bought
We’re hiding the errata, movie connections, books that influenced this book, books influenced by this book, books that cite this book and books cited by this book sections. If you would like to add content to them, you must first make them visible.
