Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography of Steve Jobs is releasing today, and we’re already busy poring through it, gaining new insight into the life and philosophies of Apple’s volatile, sometimes enigmatic co-founder.
Throughout the morning, we’ll be live updating this post with some of the best revelations, funniest stories, most interesting quotes and most enjoyable tidbits of the biography.
• Jobs’ birth mother was sent to San Francisco when she was pregnant with him to arrange a closed adoption, and her only requirement was that the adoptive parents be college graduates. But the adoptive parents backed out after the birth because they wanted a girl, so the parents Jobs did end up with were high school dropouts.
• There was apparently a standoff for weeks because the birth mother wouldn’t sign the adoption papers after learning about their level of education, and only relented when the couple had to promise they would set up an education fund for Steve. She was also holding out hope that her father would die soon so that she could marry Jandali and take her baby back.
• One of the homes Steve Jobs’ family moved into when he was a kid was an Eichler home. Joseph Eichler specialized in clean lines and open aesthetics for common people. Jobs has cited him as a direct inspiration. In fact, he described the clean elegance of those homes as the “first vision for Apple.”
• Daniel Kottke’s girlfriend at Reed didn’t like Jobs because the first time they met he spent the whole evening grilling her over how much money it would take to get her to have sex with another man.
• Apparently in college Jobs and Kottke liked to play a 19th-century German variant of chess called Kriegspiel, in which the players sit back-to-back; each has his own board and pieces and cannot see those of his opponent. A moderator informs them if a move they want to make is legal or illegal, and they have to try to figure out where their opponent’s pieces are.
• After Jobs dropped out of Reed and began auditing classes, he took a calligraphy course after seeing beautiful posters on campus. He became interested in serif and sans serif typefaces, the space between letters, and typography in general. He said that if he had never taken that course, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. “And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no computer ever would have had them.”
• At Atari, Steve Jobs was assigned to work with a straitlaced engineer named Don Lang. The next day Land complained, ‘This guy’s a goddamn hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me? And he’s impossible to deal with.’ Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use deodorant or shower regularly. “It was a flawed theory.”
• A constant complaint about Jobs in the 70s was his lack of personal hygiene. He constantly walked around barefoot, often putting up his dirty feet on the table during meetings. Another practice of his was to put his feet in the toilet during times of stress.
When Mike Scott was hired to be president of Apple, the first walk he took with Steve was one to discuss an improvement in his hygiene. Jobs responded by pointing out Scott’s own weight problems and telling him that switching to a fruitarian diet would help him lose weight. He then said that because he was a fruitarian, he only needed to shower once a week, and could eschew deodorant. Jobs was often insistent of these things.
• “The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and later everybody had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone says, ‘It’s not mine.'” – Randy Wigginton (Apple engineer)
• Before Apple went public, Steve Wozniak sold off a bunch of his stock at good prices just before the company went public to people he thought had been slighted by Jobs. People appreciated his generosity and he was well loved, but Wozniak was also seen as painfully naive. At a certain point, someone had put up a United Way poster of a destitute man on the bulletin board in the company room with “Woz in 1990” scrawled on it.
• After the company went public and Steve Jobs became a millionaire, he was still concerned with appearing as a countercultural guy. He once visited a Stanford class. Upon entering, he removed his jacket and shoes, then sat in lotus position on the desk at the front of the class, holding court and taking questions. He completely ignored questions about Apple’s stock or even ones generally relating to business, preferring instead to ask the students how many of them were virgins, or how many had taken LSD. He would later go on to complain that the younger generation was too materialistic and career-oriented for him.
During this same talk, he spent a great deal of time dreaming about a computer as small as a book. The year was 1982.
• In 1982, Steve Jobs began dating folk singer Joan Baez. According to his friend Elizabeth Holmes, one reason he liked the 41 year old Baez was that she’d been Bob Dylan’s lover in the early 1960s, and he “loved that connection to Dylan.”
• The story about how Steve Jobs learned about his birth parents is utterly bizarre. In the early 1980s, Jobs called the San Francisco doctor whose name was on his birth certificate. The doctor said he had lost all his records in a fire, but right after Steve hung up, the doctor wrote a letter saying that his mother had been an unmarried graduate student from Wisconsin named Joanne Schieble. He then sealed it and wrote “To be delivered to Steve Jobs on my death” on the front of the envelope.
• According to Andy Herzfeld, an early Apple engineer: “Steve is the opposite of loyal. He’s anti-loyal. He has to abandon the people he is close to.”
• One of the very first engineers at Apple was a young guy out of high school named Chris Espinosa. He had been convinced to drop out of Berkeley by Jobs to work on the Mac. One day, he came forward with a calculator design for the computer. Jobs looked at it, and said, “It’s a start, but basically, it stinks. The color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are big.”
Espinosa kept coming back week after week with subtle changes that Jobs had suggested, but each time, received a new rash of criticisms. He finally approached Jobs with the “Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the user to personalize and tweak the calculator by adjusting the thickness of the lines, the size and shape of the buttons, the shading, the background, etc. So he gave this to Steve, and while he apparently laughed, he also sat down at the computer, fiddled with the calculator, got up, and said that’s what he wanted. So that was the design of the computer calculator on the Macintosh for about fifteen years.
• In 1982, Apple’s interim president Mike Marakkula’s wife told him to find a replacement. Steve Jobs knew he was still too immature to be Apple’s president, so they went for Don Estridge, the man behind IBM’s PC business, which was outselling Apple’s . He turned down Apple’s offer because “he enjoyed being a part of the establishment, a member of the Navy instead of a pirate.”
• At Apple, John Sculley said that most Apple employees were more badly dressed than Pepsi’s maintenance men.
• Sculley described Pepsi’s marketing success with the Pepsi Generation campaign as one in which a lifestyle was sold, an optimistic outlook, not a product.
• Steve Jobs was fascinated by the three hundred pound oak doors at Sculley’s Greenwich mansion, so carefully hung that they swung open with the touch of a finger.
• In 1983, Apple’s ad salesmen would say: “What’s the difference between Apple and the Boy Scots? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”
• Sculley’s first meeting with Apple’s management at Pajaro Dunes, California was absolute chaos. Steve Jobs attacked the Lisa team for an unsuccessful product while they openly taunted him about his failure to deliver the Macintosh. During the bickering, a small earthquake rumbled the room. “Head for the beach!” someone shouted. When they all got to the beach, though, someone screamed that a tidal wave was coming, so they all ran the other way. This was a team that needed some management.
• The famous 1984 ad was originally used to rally Apple’s demoralized sales force, who were soundly being beaten by IBM in the PC market and had two products — the Lisa and Apple III — dead in the water. It was only months later that video was broadcast as an ad.
• Steve Jobs knew he had abandoned the hacker spirit, and the Macintosh was a machine that violated many of the spirits of the hacker code: it was expensive, couldn’t be expanded and it took special tools to just open the case. “It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.” The 1984 ad was Steve’s way of reaffirming to himself his desired self-image.
• Sculley got cold feet about the 1984 ad, but when Woz saw it, he was blown away, even offering to pay half the ad rate to get it shown at the Super Bowl out of his own pocket.
• Although Steve Jobs thought Microsoft made terrible applications, Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret deal with Bill Gates to have Excel exclusively on the Mac for two years. In exchange, Apple would indefinitely license Microsoft’s BASIC and shut down their own team. This gave Microsoft a real lever in future negotiations. Steve Jobs was so confident that he’d locked Microsoft in as an Apple-only developer he said that “we’ll all be dead” before Microsoft would release Excel for IBM PCs.
• When Microsoft announced Windows, Steve Jobs hauled Bill Gates down to Cupertino to scream at him in front of his employees. “You’re ripping us off!” he shrieked. Gates coolly responded: “Well, Steve, I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal a TV set and found out you had already stolen it.”
• Steve Jobs’ obsession with aesthetic details could be taken to ludicrous extents. For example, when they built a state-of-the-arty factory in Fremonth to manufacture the Macintosh, Jobs wanted all the machines repainted in bright colors. Apple’s manufacturing director, Matt Carter, fought him on it, because this was precision equipment, and repainting them could make them not work right. Steve persevered, and one of the most expensive machines broke, being known as Steve’s folly.
• Steve Jobs’ illegitimate daughter Lisa Brennan thinks his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint. He knew the equation that most people didn’t know: things led to their opposites.”
• Steve’s cavalier attitude towards factory working conditions started early: in 1984, when showing off Apple’s Macintosh factory to the first lady of France, Jobs became angry when more time was spent asking about overtime and vacation them than admiring the fancy machines, causing Jobs to quip: “If she’s so interested in their welfare, tell her she can come work here any time.”
• According to Jean-Lous Gassée, “the only way to deal with [Steve] was to out-bully him.” Gassée once grabbed Steve’s lapel and told him to shut his mouth.
• Burrell Smith (who designed the Macintosh’s motherboard) decided to leave Apple in early 1985, and figured out the perfect way to quit that would “nullify the reality distortion field.” He proposed just walking into Steve’s office, pulling down his pants, then urinating on Steve’s desk. “What could he say to that? It’s guaranteed to work.” Unfortunately, Steve heard about it before hand, and seemed more excited about whether Smith would actually do it than upset about him leaving.
• After John Sculley confronted Steve Jobs about a planned coup Jobs had orchestrated in 1985, he was such a wreck that he came back absolutely shattered, with a stutter that he had conquered in childhood suddenly re-emerging. Sculley’s wife was so upset she drove down to Cupertino and confronted Jobs, where she said: “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.”
• After being all but fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs went to Florence, where he fell in love with the paving stones, which came from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. Twenty years later, Steve was finally able to use this stone in an Apple product: the Apple Store.
• The first NeXT Computer had its roots in a product Jobs had headed up at Apple called the Big Mag, which would be a machine for academic researchers and have a UNIX operating system by the friendly Mac interface.
• Apple’s stock up went up almost 7% in 1985 when Steve Jobs’ resignation was announced.
• Steve’s decision to start NeXT is said by Isaacson to be primarily a need for revenge against Apple. Former NeXT employee Joanna Hoffman agreed: “Aiming at the educational market, where Apple was strong, was simply Steve being vengeful.”
• Everyone knows Paul Rand designed NeXT’s logo, but he also threw in a personal calling card for Jobs as a freebie… a gesture which devolved into a screaming match when the designer and Steve couldn’t figure out where to put the period after his middle initial.
• At NeXT in 1989, Jobs commissioned I.M. Pei to design a grand staircase for the offices that would seem to float in the air. The contractor said it couldn’t be done. It could, and years later, it would become a standard feature at Apple’s signature stores.
• Pixar was initially supposed to be another hardware business, like NeXT, where the Pixar Image Computer would be sold for $125,000 to animators, graphic designers, the medical industry and intelligence fields. He even tried to build a lower cost version of the computer that would cost only $30,000, but it never really got off the ground.
• Looking back, Steve Jobs said that if he had known Pixar’s hardware and software businesses would be failures, he never would have taken over Pixar… and missed out on one of the most incredible experiences of his life. “Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better.”
• Steve Jobs’ marriage was conducted in 1991 at the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park, in the solarium. It was conducted by Jobs’s longtime Sōtō Zen teacher, Kobun Chino, whose ceremony was so mumbling and incomprehensible that many thought he was drunk. The cake — which was strictly vegan — was declared utterly inedible by many guests.
• Some people are proud of being chewed out by Jobs. Just after returning to Apple, Jobs burst into a meeting of one of his parts suppliers, VLSI Technology, which couldn’t meet its orders. Jobs called them “fucking dickless assholes.” The executives made jackets with “Team FDA” on the back.
• The meetings at Apple are endless — because Jobs worked hard on a culture of collaboration. Jobs had dozens of meetings himself every week, and encouraged all of Apple’s departments to meet and collaborate. “Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative,” Jobs said.
• Jobs on fighting the “Bozo explosion.” Jobs felt that as companies grew, they naturally “larded up” with mediocre staff, or B Players. To prevent this, he insisted Apple hire only A Players, and he was ruthless about weeding them out.
• Jobs got the idea of hiring only A Players from the Manhattan Project. “My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn’t nearly as good as he was, but that’s what I aspired to do.”
• After Steve Jobs got Laurene Powell pregnant, he asked her to marry him, but then began ignoring her, at which point, she moved out of her apartment. He then tried to get back with his old girlfriend, Tina Redse, and tried to convince her to return to him or even marry him. He then asked all his friends to choose which woman he should be with for him. Eventually, he reconciled with Powell, who turned out to be an anchor in his life.
• One of Jobs’ favorite pieces of tech was a Miele washer and dryer from Germany. “I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years,” Jobs said.
• Once after the Monica Lewinski scandal broke, Bill and Hilary Clinton decided to come to stay with the Jobses for a weekend. When Laurene Powell was looking over the grounds before they arrived, she noticed that one of her paintings was missing. One of the Secret Service agents then pulled her aside and explained that since it was a painting of a dress on a hangar, they decided to hide it, given Lewinski’s famous blue dress.
• Steve Jobs thinks his youngest child, Eve, will eventually run Apple after him… if she doesn’t become President of the United States. She is described as a strong-willed, funny firecracker who knew how to handle her father, negotiate with him and make fun of him.
• Pixar’s Toy Story sprang from the belief that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If these objects were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence.
In 1995, Steve Jobs had been trying to sell his 80% share of Pixar, allowing him to recoup the $50 million he had spent on the bet. By the end of the year, Pixar had gone public, and his $50 million investment turned into $1.2 billion in shares, five times what Steve made when Apple went public in 1980. Jobs tried to downplay the money, though: “There’s no yacht in my future,” he hilariously said at the time.
• “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the way and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality has to be carried all the way through.”
– Jobs, reiterating a lesson from his father as a way to explain his products having to be just as beautiful inside as they are out.
