CUPERTINO,
California (AP) — Steve Jobs, the Apple founder and former CEO who
invented and masterfully marketed ever-sleeker gadgets that transformed
everyday technology, from the personal computer to the iPod and iPhone,
died Wednesday. He was 56.
Apple announced his death without
giving a specific cause. He died peacefully, according to a statement
from family members who said they were present.
"Steve's
brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations
that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple's board said in a
statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."
Jobs
had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009
after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took
another leave of absence in January — his third since his health
problems began — and officially resigned in August. He took another
leave of absence in January — his third since his health problems began —
before resigning as CEO six weeks ago. Jobs became Apple's chairman and
handed the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.
Outside
Apple's Cupertino headquarters, three flags — an American flag, a
California state flag and an Apple flag — were flying at half-mast late
Wednesday.
"Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and
work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor." Cook
wrote in an email to Apple's employees. "Steve leaves behind a company
that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the
foundation of Apple."
The news Apple fans and shareholders had
been dreading came the day after Apple unveiled its latest version of
the iPhone, just one in a procession of devices that shaped technology
and society while Jobs was running the company.
Jobs started Apple
with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was
forced out a decade later and returned in 1997 to rescue the company.
During his second stint, it grew into the most valuable technology
company in the world with a market value of $351 billion. Almost all
that wealth has been created since Jobs' return.
Cultivating
Apple's countercultural sensibility and a minimalist design ethic, Jobs
rolled out one sensational product after another, even in the face of
the late-2000s recession and his own failing health.
He helped
change computers from a geeky hobbyist's obsession to a necessity of
modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just
personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.
For
transformation of American industry, he has few rivals He has long been
linked to his personal computer-age contemporary, Bill Gates, and has
drawn comparisons to other creative geniuses such as Walt Disney. Jobs
died as Walt Disney Co.'s largest shareholder, a by-product of his
decision to sell computer animation studio Pixar in 2006.
Perhaps
most influentially, Jobs in 2001 launched the iPod, which offered "1,000
songs in your pocket." Over the next 10 years, its white earphones and
thumb-dial control seemed to become more ubiquitous than the wristwatch.
In
2007 came the touch-screen iPhone, joined a year later by Apple's App
Store, where developers could sell iPhone "apps" which made the phone a
device not just for making calls but also for managing money, editing
photos, playing games and social networking. And in 2010, Jobs
introduced the iPad, a tablet-sized, all-touch computer that took off
even though market analysts said no one really needed one.
By
2011, Apple had become the second-largest company of any kind in the
United States by market value. In August, it briefly surpassed Exxon
Mobil as the most valuable company.
Under Jobs, the company
cloaked itself in secrecy to build frenzied anticipation for each of its
new products. Jobs himself had a wizardly sense of what his customers
wanted, and where demand didn't exist, he leveraged a cult-like
following to create it.
When he spoke at Apple presentations,
almost always in faded blue jeans, sneakers and a black mock turtleneck,
legions of Apple acolytes listened to every word. He often boasted
about Apple successes, then coyly added a coda — "One more thing" —
before introducing its latest ambitious idea.
In later years,
Apple investors also watched these appearances for clues about his
health. Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagnosed with a very
rare form of pancreatic cancer — an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. He
underwent surgery and said he had been cured. In 2009, following weight
loss he initially attributed to a hormonal imbalance, he abruptly took a
six-month leave. During that time, he received a liver transplant that
became public two months after it was performed.
He went on
another medical leave in January 2011, this time for an unspecified
duration. He never went back and resigned as CEO in August, though he
stayed on as chairman. Consistent with his penchant for secrecy, he
didn't reference his illness in his resignation letter.
Steven
Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Simpson,
then an unmarried graduate student, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a student
from Syria. Simpson gave Jobs up for adoption, though she married
Jandali and a few years later had a second child with him, Mona Simpson,
who became a novelist.
Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs
of Los Altos, California, a working-class couple who nurtured his early
interest in electronics. He saw his first computer terminal at NASA's
Ames Research Center when he was around 11 and landed a summer job at
Hewlett-Packard before he had finished high school.
Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1972 but dropped out after six months.
"All
of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college
tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it," he said at a
Stanford University commencement address in 2005. "I had no idea what I
wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me
figure it out."
When he returned to California in 1974, Jobs
worked for video game maker Atari and attended meetings of the Homebrew
Computer Club — a group of computer hobbyists — with Steve Wozniak, a
high school friend who was a few years older.
Wozniak's homemade
computer drew attention from other enthusiasts, but Jobs saw its
potential far beyond the geeky hobbyists of the time. The pair started
Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. According to
Wozniak, Jobs suggested the name after visiting an "apple orchard" that
Wozniak said was actually a commune.
Their first creation was the Apple I — essentially, the guts of a computer without a case, keyboard or monitor.
The
Apple II, which hit the market in 1977, was their first machine for the
masses. It became so popular that Jobs was worth $100 million by age
25.
During a 1979 visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
Jobs again spotted mass potential in a niche invention: a computer that
allowed people to control computers with the click of a mouse, not typed
commands. He returned to Apple and ordered the team to copy what he had
seen.
It foreshadowed a propensity to take other people's
concepts, improve on them and spin them into wildly successful products.
Under Jobs, Apple didn't invent computers, digital music players or
smartphones — it reinvented them for people who didn't want to learn
computer programming or negotiate the technical hassles of keeping their
gadgets working.
"We have always been shameless about stealing
great ideas," Jobs said in an interview for the 1996 PBS series "Triumph
of the Nerds."
The engineers responded with two computers. The
pricier Lisa — the same name as his daughter — launched to a cool
reception in 1983. The less-expensive Macintosh, named for an employee's
favorite apple, exploded onto the scene in 1984.
The Mac was
heralded by an epic Super Bowl commercial that referenced George
Orwell's "1984" and captured Apple's iconoclastic style. In the ad,
expressionless drones marched through dark halls to an auditorium where a
Big Brother-like figure lectures on a big screen. A woman in a bright
track uniform burst into the hall and launched a hammer into the screen,
which exploded, stunning the drones, as a narrator announced the
arrival of the Mac.
There were early stumbles at Apple. Jobs
clashed with colleagues and even the CEO he had hired away from Pepsi,
John Sculley. And after an initial spike, Mac sales slowed, in part
because few programs had been written for it.
With Apple's stock
price sinking, conflicts between Jobs and Sculley mounted. Sculley won
over the board in 1985 and pushed Jobs out of his day-to-day role
leading the Macintosh team. Jobs resigned his post as chairman of the
board and left Apple within months.
"What had been the focus of my
entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating," Jobs said in his
Stanford speech. "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting
fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of
being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter
one of the most creative periods of my life."
He got into two
other companies: Next, a computer maker, and Pixar, a computer-animation
studio that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million.
Pixar,
ultimately the more successful venture, seemed at first a bottomless
money pit. Then in 1995 came "Toy Story," the first computer-animated
full-length feature. Jobs used its success to negotiate a sweeter deal
with Disney for Pixar's next two films, "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story
2." Jobs sold Pixar to The Walt Disney Co. for $7.4 billion in stock in a
deal that got him a seat on Disney's board and 138 million shares of
stock that accounted for most of his fortune. Forbes magazine estimated
Jobs was worth $7 billion in a survey last month.
With Next, Jobs
came up with a cube-shaped computer. He was said to be obsessive about
the tiniest details, insisting on design perfection even for the
machine's guts. The machine cost a pricey $6,500 to $10,000, and he
never managed to spark much demand for it.
Ultimately, he shifted
the focus to software — a move that paid off later when Apple bought
Next for its operating system technology, the basis for the software
still used in Mac computers.
By 1996, when Apple bought Next,
Apple was in dire financial straits. It had lost more than $800 million
in a year, dragged its heels in licensing Mac software for other
computers and surrendered most of its market share to PCs that ran
Windows.
Larry Ellison, Jobs' close friend and fellow Silicon
Valley billionaire and the CEO of Oracle Corp., publicly contemplated
buying Apple in early 1997 and ousting its leadership. The idea fizzled,
but Jobs stepped in as interim chief later that year.
He slashed
unprofitable projects, narrowed the company's focus and presided over a
new marketing push to set the Mac apart from Windows, starting with a
campaign encouraging computer users to "Think different."
Apple's
first new product under his direction, the brightly colored, plastic
iMac, launched in 1998 and sold about 2 million in its first year. Apple
returned to profitability that year. Jobs dropped the "interim" from
his title in 2000.
He changed his style, too, said Tim Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for Creative Strategies.
"In
the early days, he was in charge of every detail. The only way you
could say it is, he was kind of a control freak," he said. In his second
stint, "he clearly was much more mellow and more mature."
In the decade that followed, Jobs kept Apple profitable while pushing out an impressive roster of new products.
Apple's
popularity exploded in the 2000s. The iPod, smaller and sleeker with
each generation, introduced many lifelong Windows users to their first
Apple gadget.
The arrival of the iTunes music store in 2003 gave
people a convenient way to buy music legally online, song by song. For
the music industry, it was a mixed blessing. The industry got a way to
reach Internet-savvy people who, in the age of Napster, were growing
accustomed to downloading music free. But online sales also hastened the
demise of CDs and established Apple as a gatekeeper, resulting in
battles between Jobs and music executives over pricing and other issues.
Jobs'
command over gadget lovers and pop culture swelled to the point that,
on the eve of the iPhone's launch in 2007, faithful followers slept on
sidewalks outside posh Apple stores for the chance to buy one. Three
years later, at the iPad's debut, the lines snaked around blocks and out
through parking lots, even though people had the option to order one in
advance.
The decade was not without its glitches. In the
mid-2000s, Apple was swept up in a Securities and Exchange Commission
inquiry into stock options backdating, a practice that artificially
raised the value of options grants. But Jobs and Apple emerged unscathed
after two former executives took the fall and eventually settled with
the SEC.
Jobs' personal ethos — a natural food lover who embraced
Buddhism and New Age philosophy — was closely linked to the public
persona he shaped for Apple. Apple itself became a statement against the
commoditization of technology — a cynical view, to be sure, from a
company whose computers can cost three or more times as much as those of
its rivals.
For technology lovers, buying Apple products has
meant gaining entrance to an exclusive club. At the top was a
complicated and contradictory figure who was endlessly fascinating —
even to his detractors, of which Jobs had many. Jobs was a hero to
techno-geeks and a villain to partners he bullied and to workers whose
projects he unceremoniously killed or claimed as his own.
Unauthorized
biographer Alan Deutschman described him as "deeply moody and
maddeningly erratic." In his personal life, Jobs denied for two years
that he was the father of Lisa, the baby born to his longtime girlfriend
Chrisann Brennan in 1978.
Few seemed immune to Jobs' charisma and
will. He could adeptly convince those in his presence of just about
anything — even if they disagreed again when he left the room and his
magic wore off.
"He always has an aura around his persona," said
Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for more
than 20 years as a Creative Strategies analyst. "When you talk to him,
you know you're really talking to a brilliant mind."
But Bajarin
also remembers Jobs lashing out with profanity at an employee who
interrupted their meeting. Jobs, the perfectionist, demanded greatness
from everyone at Apple.
Jobs valued his privacy, but some details
of his romantic and family life have been uncovered. In the early 1980s,
Jobs dated the folk singer Joan Baez, according to Deutschman.
In
1989, Jobs spoke at Stanford's graduate business school and met his
wife, Laurene Powell, who was then a student. When she became pregnant,
Jobs at first refused to marry her. It was a near-repeat of what had
happened more than a decade earlier with then-girlfriend Brennan,
Deutschman said, but eventually Jobs relented.
Jobs started
looking for his biological family in his teens, according to an
interview he gave to The New York Times in 1997. He found his biological
sister when he was 27. They became friends, and through her Jobs met
his biological mother. Few details of those relationships have been made
public.
But the extent of Apple secrecy didn't become clear until
Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagonosed with — and "cured" of
— a rare form of operable pancreatic cancer called an islet cell
neuroendocrine tumor. The company had sat on the news of his diagnosis
for nine months while Jobs tried trumping the disease with a special
diet, Fortune magazine reported in 2008.
In the years after his
cancer was revealed, rumors about Jobs' health would spark runs on Apple
stock as investors worried the company, with no clear succession plan,
would fall apart without him. Apple did little to ease those concerns.
It kept the state of Jobs' health a secret for as long as it could, then
disclosed vague details when, in early 2009, it became clear he was
again ill.
Jobs took a half-year medical leave of absence starting
in January 2009, during which he had a liver transplant. Apple did not
disclose the procedure at the time; two months later, The Wall Street
Journal reported the fact and a doctor at the transplant hospital
confirmed it.
In January 2011, Jobs announced another medical
leave, his third, with no set duration. He returned to the spotlight
briefly in March to personally unveil a second-generation iPad and again
in June, when he showed off Apple's iCloud music synching service. At
both events, he looked frail in his signature jeans and mock turtleneck.
Less
than three months later, Jobs resigned as CEO. In a letter addressed to
Apple's board and the "Apple community" Jobs said he "always said if
there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and
expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know.
Unfortunately, that day has come."
In 2005, following the bout with cancer, Jobs delivered Stanford University's commencement speech.
"Remembering
that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered
to help me make the big choices in life," he said. "Because almost
everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important."
Jobs is survived by
his biological mother, sister Mona Simpson; Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his
daughter with Brennan; wife Laurene, and their three children, Erin,
Reed and Eve.
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