July 27, 1955: Joanna Hoffman, who will join the original Macintosh and NeXT teams and become Steve Jobs’ first right-hand woman, is born in Poland.
Six months younger than Jobs, the marketing executive is one of the few people willing and able to stand up to the oftentimes-fierce Apple co-founder during the first part of his career.
Joanna Hoffman: Steve Jobs’ confidante
Hoffman grew up in the Soviet Union before moving to Warsaw, Poland, and then Buffalo, New York. She came from a creative family. Her father, a successful filmmaker, directed Battle of Warsaw 1920, the first Polish 3D feature film.
Hoffman earned a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then she pursued a Ph.D. in archaeology at the University of Chicago. During that time, she attended a talk at Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research center where Jobs first saw the graphical user interface he adapted for the Mac.
At the lecture, Hoffman met Jef Raskin. He was working for Apple, writing the documentation for Apple DOS. Hoffman got into a discussion with him.
Raskin subsequently asked Hoffman to interview for a role at Apple, after which she began doing marketing for the Mac research project. When Jobs took over the Mac project, Hoffman gained a reputation as one of the few people capable of disagreeing with him. She proved immune to his “reality distortion field.”
During a trip to Italy at around the time of the Mac launch, Hoffman threatened to pour hot coffee over Jobs’ lap when he became irate over the lack of vegan food in a restaurant.
Joanna Hoffman’s career after Apple
When Jobs left Apple in the fall of 1985 after an attempted boardroom coup, Hoffman followed him to NeXT. In an early meeting, Hoffman astutely pointed out that Jobs was being unrealistic with his early projections about how quickly the NeXT Computer would ship. (Her prediction proved to be 100% accurate.)
After NeXT, Hoffman worked for promising software and electronics startup General Magic with other ex-Apple employees. She retired in 1995 to spend more time with her family. In 2020, she began work as a consultant for Sherpa.ai, a Spanish artificial intelligence company with offices in Bilbao and Silicon Valley.
… and her portrayal in the movie, Steve Jobs
Kate Winslet portrayed Hoffman in Danny Boyle’s 2015 movie Steve Jobs. Hoffman’s role in Jobs’ life wasn’t quite as extensive as was portrayed by Aaron Sorkin’s script, though. (She had nothing to do with the iMac years, for example.)
However, Hoffman was a crucially important part of the original Macintosh project — and a very important figure in Jobs’ life.
Happy birthday, Joanna!
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
4 responses to “Today in Apple history: Mac marketing guru Joanna Hoffman is born”
Her father’s biggest movie was “Potop” (The Deluge), which was nominated for Academy Award in 1975 (Best foreign language film).
Must be a slow day to have to resort to writing an article about the day a former Apple Marketing person was born.
What did you expect, a hardware announcement? These days we take what we can.
This is really scraping the barrel of Apple History