Steve Jobs Day

What the day is

Steve Jobs Day is kept in mid-October, following his death on October 5, 2011. California declared a Steve Jobs Day shortly afterward, and various October dates circulate on different calendars.

Origin and background

Jobs was born in 1955 and co-founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, who built the machines while Jobs worked out what they should be and how to sell them. The Apple II made the company; the Macintosh in 1984 established the graphical interface for ordinary buyers, borrowing heavily from research at Xerox PARC.

He was pushed out of Apple in 1985 after losing a boardroom fight. The decade that followed is the interesting part of the biography. He founded NeXT, whose computers sold poorly but whose operating system became the foundation of everything Apple ships today, and he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which became Pixar and changed animation entirely.

Apple bought NeXT in 1996, which brought him back. The company was close to failing. What followed over the next fourteen years was the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and a transformation from near-bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world.

The less flattering record is equally documented and worth keeping in view. He could be cruel to employees, took credit unevenly, denied paternity of his daughter for years, and presided over a company whose supply chain labor conditions drew sustained criticism. The mythology around him has encouraged a generation of imitators to copy the abrasiveness, which was never the part that worked.

How to take part

• Watch the 2005 Stanford commencement address. It is fifteen minutes and the best thing he said publicly.
• Read a critical biography alongside the admiring ones.
• Look at Wozniak's account of the early years, which differs from the standard telling in useful ways.
• Watch an early Pixar short. The technical leap is easier to see there than in the features.
• Take the actual lesson: he was relentless about what to leave out, which is harder than adding things.