Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, built it into the world’s most valuable technology company, and along the way transformed personal computing, mobile phones, digital music, and animated filmmaking. His career spanned more than three decades and included leading three separate companies, each of which left a lasting mark on its industry.
Co-Founded Apple and Built the First Personal Computers
Jobs started Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976, working out of a garage in California. Wozniak was the engineering talent behind the earliest Apple computers, but Jobs drove the company’s vision, product design, and business direction. The Apple II, released in 1977, became one of the first commercially successful personal computers and helped establish an entirely new industry.
In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh, which introduced a graphical interface and a mouse to mainstream computing. Before the Mac, most people interacted with computers by typing text commands. The Mac made computing visual and intuitive, setting a template that every major operating system would eventually follow.
Forced Out of Apple in 1985
As Apple grew, Jobs clashed with the company’s board and its CEO, John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had recruited in 1983. In 1985, the board sided with Sculley and pushed Jobs out of the company he had co-founded. He was 30 years old.
What followed turned out to be one of the most productive periods of his career. He founded a new computer company called NeXT and bought a struggling graphics division from Lucasfilm that would become Pixar Animation Studios.
Built NeXT and Shaped the Modern Web
NeXT made high-end computers aimed at business and education markets. The machines never sold in large numbers, but the software running them proved far more influential than anyone expected. The NeXTSTEP operating system was so well designed that portions of it still live on inside macOS today.
NeXT hardware also played a surprising role in internet history. In 1990, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer to create the World Wide Web. The early versions of iconic video games like Wolfenstein and Doom were also developed on NeXT workstations. The company’s commercial struggles masked its outsized technical influence.
Turned Pixar Into an Animation Powerhouse
In 1986, Jobs paid $5 million for Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division and renamed it Pixar. He believed the group’s computer animation technology would eventually rival Disney’s work, even though he had no background in graphic design or film production. His role was strategic: he funded the company through its early years, shaped its business direction, and led its initial public offering in 1995.
The IPO gave Pixar the capital to expand rapidly, and the studio went on to produce a string of hits starting with Toy Story. By the time Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion, its films had grossed roughly $3.2 billion worldwide. The deal also made Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder.
Returned to Apple and Launched the iPod, iPhone, and iPad
By the late 1990s, Apple was in serious financial trouble and searching for a new operating system. The company acquired NeXT, bringing Jobs back into the fold. He quickly took over as CEO and began a dramatic turnaround.
Jobs slashed Apple’s bloated product line, famously asking his team to identify just a handful of products worth focusing on and killing everything else. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he later explained. That philosophy of ruthless focus became a defining trait of his second run at Apple.
The iPod arrived in 2001, giving people a sleek, pocket-sized device that could store and play thousands of songs. The iPhone launched in 2007 and redefined the smartphone, combining a phone, music player, and internet browser into a single touchscreen device. The iPad followed in 2010, creating the modern tablet category. The iPhone became Apple’s most important product and one of the most recognizable brands in the world, eventually generating the majority of the company’s revenue.
Reshaped the Music Industry
Jobs didn’t just sell hardware. He used Apple’s devices as leverage to restructure how entire industries distributed content. The music business was his most dramatic target.
In the early 2000s, the recording industry was bleeding revenue to illegal file sharing and had no workable strategy for selling music online. In 2002, Jobs personally convinced Warner Music’s CEO, Roger Ames, that selling individual songs for 99 cents was the path forward. The iTunes Store launched in 2003 and grew to carry more than 20 million tracks, eventually selling over 16 billion songs and capturing roughly 70 percent of the digital download market.
The shift was not without friction. Record labels blamed iTunes for encouraging people to buy single songs instead of full albums, which shrank their revenue per customer. But Jobs had given the industry a legitimate alternative to piracy, and his model became the dominant way people bought music for nearly a decade, until streaming took over.
His Design and Business Philosophy
Jobs approached product development differently than most tech executives. He insisted on controlling the entire experience, from the processor inside a device to the packaging it shipped in to the retail store where customers bought it. This end-to-end control, sometimes called vertical integration, let Apple make hardware and software work together seamlessly in a way competitors who relied on third-party components struggled to match.
Simplicity was central to everything he built. But his version of simplicity meant deeply understanding every element of a product and then stripping away anything unnecessary. Eliminating a single screw or button required his teams to rethink how the entire device worked. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” he often said. The goal was a product that felt friendly and intuitive rather than intimidating.
He also rejected the common practice of relying on focus groups and market research to decide what to build. “Customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them,” he argued. Rather than asking people what features they wanted, Jobs relied on intuition about desires that hadn’t fully formed yet. He prioritized making great products over chasing short-term profits, believing that if the product was good enough, the financial results would follow.
Jobs combined technology with aesthetics in a way few others in the industry attempted. He connected the sciences with the humanities, engineering with art. There were stronger engineers and better designers working separately, but Jobs had an unusual ability to fuse the two, producing products that were both technically advanced and emotionally appealing. He died on October 5, 2011, at age 56, leaving behind a company valued at hundreds of billions of dollars and a set of products embedded in the daily lives of millions of people worldwide.