Steve Jobs’ Life Story

En español | When in 1996 Steve Jobs suspected DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg of stealing a movie idea from Jobs’s animation studio, Pixar, he got on the phone. Katzenberg offered to delay the production of his film, Antz, if Pixar agreed to delay the release of A Bug’s Life. When Jobs said he couldn’t, Katzenberg retorted: “Of course you can. You can move mountains. You taught me how!”

See also: Secrets of an innovator.

— Photo by: Ken Cedeno/Corbis

This image of Apple cofounder Jobs as the archetypal entrepreneur who makes things happen pervades much of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the computer mogul, now available in Spanish.

Steve Jobs traces the executive’s rapid ascent from cofounding Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, their initial attempts at raising capital — in which one prospective investor turned them down after deciding they were “a couple of young, scruffy-looking guys” — and the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984.

The Mac was the first commercially successful personal computer with a mouse and a graphical user interface, which allowed users to drag their mouse and “click” on icons instead of typing commands in computer language. Bestselling products like the iPhone and iPad followed. Through multi-touch technology — permitting users to interact with the screen via their fingertips — Apple’s gadgets revolutionized the way people communicate and use computers. Their popularity keeps growing. An estimated 20 million people in the United States have iPhones, more than 30 percent of whom are Hispanic. And though iPads were introduced just a year ago, 8 percent of U.S non-Hispanics, and 18 percent of Latinos, own an iPad or tablet.

The story of the Mac’s creation sheds light on a darker side of Jobs’s perfectionism and innovation. While acknowledging that the idea of an affordable “screen and keyboard and computer all in one unit” was Apple employee Jef Raskin’s, Jobs decided to carry the initiative to fruition. It was, Isaacson writes, “inevitable that once Jobs set his sights on the Macintosh project, Raskin’s days were numbered.” Shortly afterward, Raskin left Apple.

Next: Jobs’s “reality distortion field.” >>