This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Although he was a billionaire and a legendary jerk, Steve Jobs could be surprisingly accessible and even friendly.
He might take your family photo, dress up like Frankenstein for a haunted house or tell a group of interns that he spends his free time bonking his wife.
Here are some of my favorite stories and anecdotes about everyday encounters with Jobs.
After leaving my job at Apple, I dropped in for lunch one day. I was exiting the main building, Infinite Loop One, and just ahead of me was Steve Jobs, walking with the usual spring in his step that never seemed to go away even as he started looking more frail. Bumping into Steve was a surprisingly common occurrence for such a large company as Apple. Steve was heading towards a car parked next to the curb with its door open, waiting for him. The car was idling.
A family was standing near the Apple sign outside the building, a common site for people to take photos on their pilgrimages to Apple. The father turned to Steve as he passed close by and asked, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind taking our photo?”
Steve paused for a moment as an iPhone was extended to him, realizing that they didn’t seem to know who he was. With a hint of enthusiasm, he said “Sure!” as he took the iPhone into his hands.
Steve took a great deal of care composing the photo, backing up a few steps several times, tapping the iPhone screen to lock focus, then said “Smile!” as he snapped the photo, grinning a little bit himself to encourage the family to follow suit.
He handed back the iPhone and they said “Thank you, sir” as Steve stepped into his car, closed the door and was driven away. The family looked at the photo that Steve had taken and all agreed that it looked great. Then the iPhone was pocketed and they were on their way.
And that was the last time I saw Steve Jobs.
Before I met the wife I had a girlfriend named Rebecca. Rebecca had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was a rough time in her life and she was very depressed by it, even though chemotherapy was healing her over time.Rebecca was a big fan of Pixar films.[…]
I sent a letter to Steve Jobs telling him about Rebecca and her situation. I asked for an autograph for her, hoping that could be something positive for her and encourage some positivity. I never thought I would get a reply, but i thought it was worth a try.
A week later I receive a package in the mail. In this thick envelope was a letter from Steve Jobs speaking of his cancer fight and how he wished Rebecca a quick recovery.
Also in this envelope was six Pixar prints signed by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Mike Doctor, and Joe Ranft (a fellow cancer sufferer). Each of these men had written a letter to Rebecca wishing her well.
Jobs did not have to go to this kind of trouble, but he did anyway. Steve Jobs was not a man known for his public charity and many people think he was driven by selfishness and greed. But this act goes against that idea for me. This was most certainly a positive, selfless, and charitable act.
Kristopher Wright, Quora, Oct 6, 2011
One of my friends did an internship at Apple. Apparently Apple has a day where the interns get to meet Steve Jobs (this was obviously a few years back) and ask him questions.
Two questions that were asked stuck in her mind:
1.“What do you wish for the most?”Steve Jobs:“I wish people would stop asking me stupid questions.”
2.“What do you do in your free time?”
Steve Jobs:“I f*** my wife.”
Dan Zhang, Quora, Dec 29, 2011
Prior to his return to Apple, it was obvious that the company was in trouble. […] I wrote an impassioned email to Steve at Pixar, pleading with him to find something else to do with his time. “Please,” I implored him, “don’t come back to Apple, you’ll ruin it.”
At the time, I really thought Steve and Larry were just twisting the knife into an already struggling company. As I made my living on Macs, I wanted the company to survive and not be distracted by Steve and Larry’s games.
Shortly thereafter, Steve emailed me. He explained what he was trying to do, and that he was trying to save Apple.
And then he wrote the words I’ll never forget: “You may be right. But if I succeed, remember to look in the mirror and call yourself an asshole for me.”
Consider it done, Steve. I could not have been more mistaken.
Michell Smith, Quora, Oct 24, 2012
In 1988, I was self-employed as a recruiter and had referred a number of candidates to Steve at NeXT Computer, which he subsequently hired. I had also worked at Sun Microsystems as a contract recruiter. In September of that year, Steve invited me to his offices on Deer Creek Road in Palo Alto for an informal interview. He was 45 minutes late. As soon as Steve led me into his office and closed the door, he turned and said, “You recruited for Sun and Sun hires shitty people.”
“Well,” I retorted, “You hired the ones Sun didn’t want.”
At that point, Steve cracked a big smile and exclaimed, “Touche!”
After that, we had a nice chat for about twenty minutes. During this time, a crowd of NeXT employees gathered and paced outside. When Steve opened the door to escort me out, he was mobbed like a celebrity, while I was shoved aside.
As I was about to exit the lobby, I heard Steve call out my name. I turned and saw Steve bending down and waving to me, childlike. I walked away thinking to myself, “That guy can be a real jerk, but he sure is charming.”
Growing up I was a huge Apple fan-boy (fine, still am.) The first NY Apple store in Soho opening was probably the coolest thing that happened to me between the ages 6 and 12. For a while I would spend almost every weekend there.
Every year for halloween I was a Mac, and I made a habit of shaving the Apple logo into my head to celebrate every OS launch.
My neighbor Brooke mentioned that Steve Jobs, busy as he is, always reads email sent to his public address.
I think I was around 10 or 12, and I sent a very enthusiastic and grammatically incorrect message including a picture of my shaved head [with an Apple logo in the back].
Apparently he forwarded it to the head of Public Relations, Katie [Cotton], and I got invited to the opening of the 5th Avenue Cube. I can never thank them enough. This was probably the high point of my childhood.
[…] He almost ran me over. As I walked back from the campus fitness center, a silver Mercedes S-Class launched a wheel onto the sidewalk and nearly took me out. I whipped around and threw a dirty look at the driver. The door opened, and the driver spat an expletive at the curb as he exited.
I recognized the face immediately. It’s him, I thought. Oh God, he’s pissed. […] I kept walking. DO NOT ENGAGE, I thought. DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT. But I couldn’t help myself. He kept walking briskly behind me, staring at the ground, visibly irritated about his car and whatever made him come into the office.
After I looked back for the third or fourth time, he cracked a smile that said, This kid doesn’t even have the balls to talk to me. It was a week before Macworld New York. I took a deep breath and spoke.”Ready for the show?”
He looked up and smiled for real. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of great stuff. It’s going to be fun.”
“Well, I grew up in New York. Say hi for me.”
Another smile. “OK.”
He walked past me and held the IL1 lobby door open. Steve Jobs. Holding the door for me. What?
That moment changed my life, and other former and current employees surely have moments like it. Whatever Steve was upset about that day was almost certainly more serious than anything I have faced in my career. Yet he still had the good sense to give me a smile and an act of courtesy. It taught me to never lose perspective and never forget who you’re dealing with, no matter what else is going on.
I was an intern and one day the head of the intern program gathered the almost 100 interns into the Town Hall auditorium in Infinite Loop 4 for a “surprise guest speaker” that wasn’t really much of a surprise: Steve Jobs.
The meeting had no agenda but I had a hunch that when Steve (everyone who has ever worked at Apple just calls him “Steve”) ended his remarks there would be a Q&A session.
[…] Steve got to about his 4th question from the audience and by this point almost every single intern had their hand up. [Steve pointed to me] I was nervous. “Steve, many years ago you left Apple to start NeXT. But recently you returned to Apple. Why did you come back to Apple?” […]
“When I was trying to decide whether to come back to Apple or not I struggled. I talked to a lot of people and got a lot of opinions. And then there I was, late one night, struggling with this and I called up a friend of mine at 2 a.m. I said, ‘should I come back, should I not?’ and the friend replied, ‘Steve, look. I don’t give a fuck about Apple. Just make up your mind’ and hung up. And it was in that moment that I realized I truly cared about Apple.”
[The friend Steve called was Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO]
As the conversation went: “I hear you’re not really one to give autographs, but I just gotta ask….will you sign my iPod? It’s fine if you don’t want to. I’m not normally one to even ask for autographs.”
Steve: *chuckling* “It’s quite alright. You heard that about me?? Well, I wouldn’t say that I don’t like giving autographs, I guess I was never comfortable with the idea solely taking credit for something, which is to me what an autograph might imply. To be honest, I think I’m the last person who should sign something. A writer signing a book I can understand, but I think if anybody within our company should sign something, it should be members from our R&D team and all the others responsible for product innovation. It’s unfortunate that they all can’t receive the same level recognition. But I suppose it’s easier this way though?… you would need a pretty big iPod to fit all those signatures”.
I wanted to share with you a memory of my friend Steve Jobs, a memory that in the days since his passing has come to represent how great of a guy he was, and how good he was to me.
I first met Steve in 2003, over the phone, when I cold-called him to tell him I was a devout fan of all things Apple and would love to be involved in whatever way I could with the company. I remember the call extremely well; me on my hotel room bed, fidgeting and doodling and circuitously explaining that all I could really explain was that I wanted to have a relationship. I got nervous at one point and started second guessing myself and my intentions for calling, to which Steve replied “don’t worry, I have a very good bullshit detector.” I found it very comfortable to be myself around him from that moment on.
The bullshit detector must have stayed silent because In the following months and years I was invited to help introduce products and software at several Macworld keynote addresses in San Francisco. I got to know him a bit in our time together on and off the stage. I remember Steve as being almost iridescent; one second he would be talking to you about “architecture” as it related to digital data flow, and then in a microsecond turn his head a different way and mention Bob Dylan or a killer sushi place and just be the biggest rock star on the planet.
in Spring of 2008, RIM (makers of the Blackberry) approached me about sponsoring my upcoming summer tour, and as I got closer to accepting the offer I knew I had to call Steve to give him the heads up. I explained to him that the money they offered would allow for a better stage design and an all around higher level of production. I also told him that the contract with Blackberry would mean using their products exclusively. He thanked me for calling him, praised the people at Blackberry and told me he would send me an iPhone to at least play with on the bus.
I accepted the offer with Blackberry, and in the months leading up to the July 29th release date, the iPhone became the most desired item on the planet. Everybody wanted one, and nobody had yet to see one in person. It was mythical. That day I was playing an ampitheatre in Indianapolis, and sometime in the afternoon the production office got a call over the radio that a sales associate from the local Apple Store was standing at the outermost gate of the venue with something addressed to me. A few minutes later someone knocked on my dressing room door and handed me an Apple Store bag. Inside was an iPhone, and taped to it was a card; it belonged to Steve Jobs, CEO, 1 Inifinite Loop, Cupertino, California. Handwritten on the backside of the card was one word: “Enjoy!”
Just the greatest thing.
I used to think that when you died, everything you ever learned and amassed along the way in your life just stopped existing, all of it returned into the universe and repurposed for something else completely. Steve’s passing made me realize that can’t be true, because every bit of energy and intellect he spent his life to collect is still here with us, as vital as it was when it was with him. I can’t think of a better way to measure a life well lived.
John Mayer’s Tumblr, Oct 20, 2011
I once forwarded an email from Steve Jobs to a friend, adding a snarky comment. Steve’s reply informed me that I’d replied, not forwarded. Steve was extremely cool about it. He said he’d been emailed FAR worse things accidentally. And many not so accidentally…
Pixar director Lee Unkrich, @leeunkrich, Twitter, Oct 11, 2011
Here in Palo Alto, Steve Jobs isn’t just an icon, he’s also the guy who lives down the street.
I first met Steve years ago at a backyard pool party. I was so flummoxed by the off chance I was breathing in his DNA, I could barely say a word. I am sure I made a winning first impression as I stumbled over my own name when we were introduced.
I watched as he swam in the pool with his son. He seemed like a regular guy, a good dad having fun with his kids.
The next time I met him was when our children attended school together. He sat in on back-to-school night listening to the teacher drone on about the value of education (wait, isn’t he one of those high-tech gods who didn’t even graduate from college?) while the rest of us sat around pretending having Steve Jobs in the room was totally normal.[…]
It was at Halloween not long after when I realized he actually knew my name (yes, my name!). He and his wife put on a darn scary haunted house […]. He was sitting on the walkway, dressed like Frankenstein. As I walked by with my son, Steve smiled and said, “Hi Lisen.” My son thought I was the coolest mom in town when he realized The Steve Jobs knew me. Thanks for the coolness points, Steve.
From then on, when I saw him holding his executive meetings in our neighborhood, I didn’t hesitate to smile and say hi. Steve always returned the favor, proving he may be a genius, but he is also a good neighbor.
In time, things changed. The walks were less frequent, the gait slower, the smile not so ready. Earlier this year when I saw Steve and his wife walking down our street holding hands, I knew something was different. Now, so does the rest of the world.
While Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal and CNET continue to drone on about the impact of the Steve Jobs era, I won’t be pondering the MacBook Air I write on or the iPhone I talk on. I will think of the day I saw him at his son’s high school graduation. There Steve stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, his smile wide and proud, as his son received his diploma and walked on into his own bright future leaving behind a good man and a good father who can be sure of the rightness of this, perhaps his most important legacy of all.
I remember being at a talk he gave shortly after returning in 1997 as Interim CEO. A bunch of us employees (I was at ATG at the time) were in Town Hall in Building 4 at Infinite Loop to hear him, and he was fired up. Talked a lot about how Apple was going to completely turn things around and become great.
It was a tough time at Apple — we were trading below book value on the market — our enterprise value was actually less than our cash on hand. And the rumors were everywhere that we were going to be acquired by Sun. Someone in the audience asked him about Michael Dell’s suggestion in the press a few days previous that Apple should just shut down and return the cash to shareholders, and as I recall, Steve’s response was: “Fuck Michael Dell.” Good god, what a message from a CEO!
He followed it up by admitting that the stock price was terrible (it was under $10, I think — pretty sure it was under $2 split-adjusted), and that what they were going to do was reissue everyone’s options on the low price, but with a new 3 year vest.
He said, explicitly: “If you want to make Apple great again, let’s get going. If not, get the hell out.” I think it’s not an overstatement to say that just about everyone in the room loved him at that point, would have followed him off a cliff if that’s where he led.
I was at a Bjork concert at Shoreline back in 2007 when I met an engineer at Apple called Skip Haughay. We stayed in touch and I visited him a few weeks later at the Apple campus, the day before iPhone launched. There was an incredible buzz around Campus and we saw Jobs walking tall with his iPhone. Skip ushered me out to the parking lot, said “I could be fired for this” and showed me the iPhone the day before it launched.
That evening, Skip calls me to say that “My date has cancelled, do you want to join me at the iPhone launch party?” It still ranks as maybe the dumbest question anyone has asked me in my life… and this was only a few weeks after we met. I raced to get ready and joined him at the exploratorium in San Francisco.
The big surprise was that Apple was so secretive, that most employees hadn’t seen or touched an iPhone themselves (Skip was one of the few entrusted with one). Since I’d bought an iPhone earlier in the day, many of the employees wanted to touch and play with mine. So I spent much of the evening giving iPhone demonstrations to other Apple employees!
Then there was Steve Jobs on the stage. The only private speech I’ve ever seen him give. He thanked all the Apple employees and particularly the partners and families of all the people working at Apple. He was gracious to a fault… it sounded like he’d matured a great deal from when I’d read Insanely Great. He was mesmerizing and quite clearly he cared, not just about the product but also the people.
I saw Jony Ive and spoke with him briefly. Then I also saw Steve Jobs. Skip was hesitant to say hello, so I just went up to him myself. Steve responded with a “I’ll talk to you in a moment” and then shortly thereafter walked off. It might’ve been a casual brush off but honestly I wasn’t bothered at all. Skip just laughed at the whole thing. It was one of the most amazing evenings of my life.
I’ll never forget the passion, ingenuity and spirit of the group that evening. All of which was so wonderfully embodied in Skip. The two of us stayed friends for many years afterwards. Just recently, my girlfriend and I visited him in Morgan Hill on his farm. Skip said it was “The Farm that Jobs built.” He was in his element with nature and the farm animals. I was delighted to see him so happy.
Skip passed away himself only a month ago (https://www.mercurynews.com/crime…). So for it to be followed by Steve Jobs just compounded the tragedy. While Steve Jobs was an icon, I will most remember Skip as my friend.
Bruno Bowden, Quora, Oct 11, 2011
My wife and me were walking in downtown Palo Alto one afternoon when I notice a man walking towards us. I immediately recognized Jobs and nudged my wife. Nobody noticed him as we walked down the pavement The year must have been 2003 and I had just ordered a pair of Keen sandals off the Keen website. Back then Keen was not well known and you hardly saw anybody wearing Keens.
As Jobs got closer, there was moment when he looked at my feet and noticed the Keens I was wearing. He was wearing an identical pair. He looked up at me and gave me a smile and a nod. He then walked passed us and stopped to take a look at the Apple store from the other side of the street. A minute later he turned and continued on his way.
Not much of a story at all…..but something I will never forget.
Nikhil Sohoni, Quora, June 5, 2013
I had left a company called Taligent with a few other folks in the mid-90s and we had been cooped up in a small office in a strip mall in Los Altos working on the idea we thought was pretty cool.
The product was a browser with built-in multimedia/animation support so you could build the sort of full-screen animated experiences you had on CD-ROMs (except with markup) and transmit it across the web. This was in the days when HTML barely had support for gifs and way before Flash, so we thought it could open up a lot of new possibilities.
Once we had a decent running demo I started showing it around. At some point I had the notion that I’d like to get feedback from Jobs. I had been a big fan — one of my first applications in college was on an Apple IIe and my first consulting job ever was working on the C++ compiler at Apple in the 80’s.
He was at NeXT by this time. So I wrote him there and mentioned what we’d been working on and asked for advice. To my surprise I got a note back from his secretary saying Steve wanted to meet.
I showed up at the NeXT offices a week later and was shown to a meeting room down the hall from his office. I set up my demo and waited. And waited. He walked in 1/2 hour late, put his feet up on the table and asked me what I had. I introduced myself and mentioned that a couple of the engineers were ex-Apple people. Then I ran through the demo, stopped, and asked him what he thought.
For the next half an hour he went on to rant pretty much non-stop… about the arrogance of Apple (!!!), the quality of their products, and anything unsavory you could think of. There were a lot of ‘you Apple people’ in there. I tried to break in and mention that we weren’t really related to Apple (except the demo was running on a Mac Powerbook) but there was no stopping him.
“Boy, what a dick,” I remember thinking. It went on and on.
At some point a secretary stuck her head in and said he had a call. So I figured that was that. Instead he asked if I could stick around. I remember hesitating for a second, thinking if I really wanted to hear more of that abuse. But for some reason I said yes. He walked out and I sat there. And sat. And sat. For a good 30-45 minutes, I sat there and got more and more steamed about this predicament. Do I pack up and walk out or do I wait and hear more about how Apple sucks?
Then he comes back in. I was sitting down. He gets in front of the whiteboard and starts drawing notes. For the next I-don’t-know-how-long he mapped out precisely how the product could be rolled out, the strategy for taking it to market, how it should be positioned, what other parts would be needed to fill in the gaps, all the way down to the features that should be taken out or added. It was the most amazing, useful, spot-on, and entertaining display of product management erudition I’d ever seen. He completely understood the product, the space, and what it could be used for.
I remember asking him if he wanted a job :-)
We both laughed at that. I remember him saying some nice things about the idea and the product itself. There was no trace of the nasty anti-Apple bile left. I thanked him profusely and he asked me to stay in touch. I walked out with my head still buzzing in the clouds.
As it happened it turned out my ex-Apple cohorts weren’t too happy with my having gone over to see him either. There were choice words about Jobs, so the feelings seemed to be mutual.
A few months later word came that Apple was acquiring NeXT and the rest is history.
My cohorts went on to out-vote me and eventually the company got sold to Microsoft. The product was never released publicly and they all went to work up at Redmond.
I still remember that meeting with Jobs to this day.
A few years ago I was working on another software product that I thought could benefit from his advice. By then he had been back at Apple and the iPhone was a huge hit. I kept holding off until the product was a bit more solid before sending him a note. Then I read that he was sick and a little while later he passed away.
I really wished I could have shown him the new product. I imagine he would have made me wait around for a long while then taken me on a rant on how great Apple products are :-)
And then he would have no doubt gotten up and shown, once again, exactly how he would have done it.
Ramin Firoozye, Quora, July 17, 2013
Prior to his return to Apple, it was obvious that the company was in trouble. Larry Ellison had floated the idea of a hostile takeover of the company, but it seemed to some of us Apple watchers that then-CEO Gil Amelio’s turnaround plan might work.
I wrote an impassioned email to Steve at Pixar, pleading with him to find something else to do with his time. “Please,” I implored him, “don’t come back to Apple, you’ll ruin it.”
At the time, I really thought Steve and Larry were just twisting the knife into an already struggling company. As I made my living on Macs, I wanted the company to survive and not be distracted by Steve and Larry’s games.
Shortly thereafter, Steve emailed me. He explained what he was trying to do, and that he was trying to save Apple.
And then he wrote the words I’ll never forget:
“You may be right. But if I succeed, remember to look in the mirror and call yourself an asshole for me.”
Consider it done, Steve. I could not have been more mistaken.
Michell Smith, Quora, Oct 23, 2012
This was in June ’10 just a few days before Apple’s WWDC. I was working late out of a cafe and was testing one of my apps on the iPad. This was in India and at that time the iPad hadn’t been officially launched here, so was something that would definitely catch someone’s eye.
There was this girl sitting on the next table and was pretty curious about this new thing, moments later she stopped by and we had a nice chat about how cool the iPad is, and was pretty impressed that I could actually write an app that could run on it.
I went home and before going to bed wrote a short email to Steve about how an iPad got a girl interested in me and almost forgot about it until…. Days later, it was his WWDC keynote and I was following a few live blogs that night as I always do (I was GMT +5:30), then suddenly I saw something that was very familiar, it was my email that Steve displayed on the huge screen behind him. He said “It is magical, I know it because I got this email: I was sitting in a cafe with my iPad, and it got a girl interested in me!.” “So there’s proof.”
Chaitanya Pandit, Quora, Oct 27, 2012
About five years ago, one evening, just as I had sat down with my wife and daughter at Saravana Bhavan, a South Indian vegetarian restaurant in Sunnyvale, in walked Steve Jobs with his wife and son. They sat down on the table behind us. It was a busy school night and the place was packed with loud kids and hungry Indians vying for attention of the woefully inadequate staff. Like the clientele at this hangout – mostly Indian techies looking for cheap but authentic food – the staff is also authentic Indian: many speak limited English only and are not aware of the rich and famous of the Silicon Valley.
So, it was with great amusement, we watched Steve raise his hand several times to attract the attention of the waiter, who summarily ignored him. As the only white guy in the restaurant, we thought he would be instantly recognized and served with special attention. Instead, he had the worst table in the house. A bored waiter passed plastic menu cards at his family without giving a second glance. Eventually, he did get served with the mass efficiency of an overworked staff. And, no one bothered him during his dinner either.
My wife and I observed in awe as Steve and his family enjoyed a quiet meal in the riotous, inexpensive place in the heart of Silicon Valley. It dawned on us that no one in the restaurant had recognized Steve in his low-key attire and stubble. At the end, when no one came to his table to present the check, Steve rose up, dropped a few cash notes on the table and walked out, as the server wiped his table.
Just then, the manager walked by, and I asked him, “Did you know that was Steve Jobs?” He smiled and gave me the Indian head shake – a cross between yes and no. To this day, I don’t know what he meant.
Anurag Wadehra, Quora, Oct 27, 2012
I was an intern at Apple in 2004. I saw Steve Jobs in IL3, on the second level. He was just walking away from a couch. I said hello, folded my hands and told him how much I admired him. I then told him how much I learn at Apple, and how I would love to learn from him. I said to him – “Teach me, teach me.”
He fired me on the spot.
Anonymous, Quora, Oct. 25, 2012
At a recent Self-Realization Fellowship Sunday morning service, Brother Bhumananda, a Self Realization Fellowship minister, said that a few years back the phone rang up at Self Realization headquarters (in Los Angeles).
The caller said, “This is Steve Jobs.” The person answering initially thought it was a prank call, but it really was Steve Jobs calling personally to say, “I want to get permission to put ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ on iTunes. It’s my favorite book!”
Steve Jobs said that he had read ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ over 30 times. It was the first audiobook to become available on iTunes.
Milton Drepaul, Quora, May 1, 2012
A bunch of us were in the old screening room in Point Richmond with Steve early the morning of the Pixar IPO. We were watching the financial news for that PIXR ticker to go by. So we witnessed the moment that Steve became a billionaire. Quite the payoff for $50 million and almost a decade of hanging in there.
He didn’t say anything. No fist pumps or whoops. But I’ve never seen him happier. That was one beaming smile.
Craig Good, Quora, Oct. 11, 2011
I met Steve Jobs randomly while working as an intern at Apple in the summer of 2010. I had stepped into an elevator on the main Apple campus when, just as the door was closing, Steve Jobs strolled in. He saw that I had an intern badge on, and asked me what I was working on over the summer.
When he asked me this question, I wasn’t sure what to say. Should I tell him what I was working on, and risk getting in trouble for disclosing what I was working on (as we had been instructed not to do during orientation), or should I just tell him that I wasn’t allowed to tell him?
I went with the latter, telling him, “Sorry, but I’m not supposed to tell you.” Steve flashed a smile, chuckled a little, and stepped out of the elevator.
Michael Chang, Quora, Oct. 16, 2012
This story was told to me by the not too bright guy who used to run the Palo Alto retail store at Helio (Helio wireless carrier), a now-extinct Korean smartphone company that combined a music player with a phone. This was in 2007, right when the first iPhone came out. Given that their store had opened directly across the street from the existing Palo Alto Apple Store on University Avenue, a lot of people were curious as to what Helio did and how their product compared to the iPhone. One day the manager noticed a guy wearing a black turtleneck, blue jeans, and glasses staring at the “Helio: don’t call it a phone” window display outside the store for quite some time. When the manager came out to ask if he could help him or give him a demo of the product inside, the guy in the black turtleneck stuck his head in and peered into the store, but deliberately did not set his foot inside. It took some time, but finally he responded to the manager by shaking his head and saying the words “You guys just don’t get it, do you…” and continued walking down the street. The manager had no idea who this guy was and thought nothing of it.
Two weeks later, the same manager was inside the store giving a demo of the amazing Helio smartphone to some prospective customers when he was interrupted by someone at the door. It was the same guy in the black turtleneck and blue jeans. “You guys STILL just don’t get it, do you???” the guy said in an elevated voice from the entrance of the store. Then before the manager could respond, the guy was gone again.
The manager was visibly annoyed and said to his customers “Who is this guy and who the hell does he think he is???”
“That’s the founder of Apple,” replied the customers.
Suffice to say, Helio moved out of the retail store only a year later, replaced by a much more popular Lululemon store.
Mark Young, Quora, Nov 1, 2012
It was hard not to run into Steve Jobs if you spent anytime in downtown Palo Alto. While I never had a conversation with him, my chance encounters reminded me just how human this innovator was.
Once, I drove up behind his car on the way to Whole Foods. (pretty easy to spot his car, especially with his “license plate.”) As I drove up behind him, I could see the gas cap dangling from the side of his car. I tried to grab my phone to snap a picture before deciding that stalking him as he went into Whole Foods would be bad. Chalked it up to a mad genius sometimes forgetting the small stuff.
A month later, driving by his house, glanced to see his car parked out front and the GAS CAP DANGLING AGAIN.
Loved it. Not because it had some profound effect on me, but just because it showed me we’re all human. Even the brightest of us all.
Mark Hull, Quora, Oct 23, 2012
About ’82 or ’83, I and 5 others, including Steve, had dinner together in NYC. The now legendary, late Jay Chiat, then CEO of Chiat-Day Advertising, invited his client Steve, and his other client, Pioneer Electronics CEO Jack Doyle and his wife Ann, Pioneer’s ad manger, and me, Pioneer Senior VP Marketing and Product Development, to dinner.
Never mind the fact that much older Jay and Jack had accomplished so much more at that point than had Steve, he dominated the conversation, brusquely brushing aside anything he didn’t agree with, which, as I recall, was most everything said by the rest of us.
Dinner was over and while we waited for desert, Ann lit up a cigarette (remember this was the early ’80’s in NYC), holding it away and blowing smoke away from the rest of us at the table. Steve, who was seated next to Ann, gave no indication that this bothered him. He simply went on talking animatedly as he had all dinner.
At one point Ann put her lit cigarette in an ashtray the opposite side of Steve. He never looked at it but must have seen her put it down because without so much as a glance toward her or the cigarette, without breaking from whatever topic he was currently holding forth on at that moment, he reached across her, picked the cigarette up from the ashtray, and dropped it in her half full water glass.
I can still see the stunned looks on everyone’s face except Steve who continued to educate the rest of us on . . . I have no idea.
No doubt Steve was a genius given all he and Apple, under his direction, later accomplished. However based on what I’ve heard about him personally, and witnessed that night, he’s not a person I would care to spend time with. One dinner was more than enough.
William Matthies, Quora, June 28, 2013
I bumped into Steve at the Palo Alto Whole Foods near both of our homes. He was in front of me in line paying for his groceries. It was the express checkout and he was wearing his traditional black turtle-neck. This was back in the early 2000s.
Here was a very wealthy, smart guy arguing with the cashier about what the correct change was for his purchase. He was demanding that he got another quarter ($0.25) for his change. This discussion went on for several minutes and held up the line so much that everyone behind him (including us) were getting annoyed.I guess Steve had to be right. The cashier gave him a quarter and he walked away.
Roy Pereira, Quora, Oct. 24, 2012
In the early 1980s, Steve used to eat lunch at “The Good Earth,” the now-defunct Cupertino restaurant where I waitressed when I was sixteen.
I remember this nerdy young guy who always ordered the Good Earth tostada, served in a whole-wheat tortilla and topped with sprouts. He smiled shyly at me when he asked for more Good Earth tea and drank gallons of the stuff.
Steve always sat alone, devouring books and manuals way beyond my limited teenage understanding along with his food. […]
I called my mom the moment I heard Steve Jobs had died. She was sitting in front of her iMac, from which she has a view of the Cupertino Valley, The Apple headquarters nestled in the middle like a brilliant white palace. She was crying.”There was a rainbow one day,” she sobbed, “that ended right on top of Apple.”
My mom snapped a photograph. “I wanted to send it to him!” she added. “I meant to send it to him. And now,” she stopped suddenly, struggling for control. “Now, he’s dead.”
