Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson [Book Summary – Review]


It isn’t nearly possible to emphasize the part that Jobs had in the building of our current, computer-mediated life.

An independent-thinker idealist, Jobs had been a dreamer who wished for developing the planet with tech.

Throughout this bestseller memoir, you’ll find out that although Jobs’s idealism and density drove him to accomplish huge things, those were the reason behind disagreement and struggle. In his connections with workers and colleagues, Jobs’s habit was often viewed as brattish – although he might say that Jobs was just trying to make others give their maximum. 

The next sections show in specifics the amazing living of a very powerful technology figure of our world and narrate the wondrous tale of a young joke that joined a companion that would finally build an extremely precious technology firm in the globe.


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Chapter 1 – A professional parent and a kidder buddy inserted Jobs’ passion for design and engineering.


A baby boy came to the world on the 24th of February in 1955  to Schieble and Jandali.

Yet, Schieble and Jandali could not keep their baby. For the mother raised in an extreme Catholic house which would deny her for carrying a kid from a Muslim guy, the couple had to leave their son to be adopted.

Thus, the kid was embraced by the Jobs family, two spouses residing around Silicon Valley, and they called him Steven.

The man was a motor technician working in the automobile mechanic, and Paul Jobs brought the little boy to the realm of design and engineering.

Since the early years, the man worked to move all his passion for machines to the little boy, who remembers becoming a fan of his dad’s concentration on handiwork. When the house required a cupboard, for instance, Paul would just make one, allowing Steve to assist Paul throughout the work.

Moreover, their intellectual but affordable Eichler house – a “normal” contemporary house with glass from the floor to the ceiling and a free layout design – inspired Steve’s consuming affair with an accurate, chic design.



Then, during secondary school, Jobs came to know Steve Wozniak; they became friends right away. 

Wozniak was 5 years ahead and previously experienced as a computer mechanic, and from Wozniak, Jobs grasped too much regarding computers.

Of all kinds, Wozniak and Jobs were ordinary teenagers and loved to perform pranks. Yet, they liked to discover the system of electronics as well and find out something they might make.

Putting the two affairs together, around 1971, the couple released their first creation: a “Blue Box”, which was a tool that lets users perform phone calls from a far distance without charges.

Wozniak provided the plan and Jobs made the creation a business, spending $40 as the cost of assemblies and they show it in the market for 150 USD.

The two sold nearly 100 boxes, providing them with a pattern of the things they may achieve with Wozniak’s knowledge and Jobs’s sight; and facilitating the path for the company which would be their common enterprise – Apple.


Chapter 2 – Jobs’s affair with spirituality, arts, and LSD formed his tasteful manner and intense concentration.


By the end of the 1960s, the preferences and unusual lifestyles of hippies and geeks started to flap.

Thus, maybe it was certain that, alongside his love of mathematics, mechanics, and science, Jobs might engage in an alternative lifestyle and start living with LSD.

He then channeled his sharpened tasteful manner and intense concentration on his knowledge of spirituality and psychedelic medications.

Around 1972, he registered in Reed College, an enlightened art college around Oregon, there, he turned very determined on meditating and trialing with LSD together with fellows.

He sensed that his medication’s knowledge assisted him to strengthen his awareness of the things that were prominent in the world, by revealing that there exists “other sides of the world”. In his situation, it meant figuring out that making wonderful things was the most prominent thing.

Urged to discover Eastern spiritualism, he also traveled to India, and there he found himself resident for almost half a year. Buddhism in specific turned into a strongly rooted character of himself, impacted his simplest tasteful manner, and providing him with the strength of inspiration.



Both affairs – spirituality and the LSD – assisted him to grow a specific kind of concentration, which turned familiar as Jobs’s truth deformity slogan: if he’d chose that a matter should occur, then he would just work on it to occur by directing the truth as his wish.

One more reason that formed Jobs’s simplest tastefulness was his creativity in the arts. All along with his profession, Jobs would insist again and again on the issue that Apple’s design should be neat and straightforward. 

This pattern was made during his studying time. Although Jobs polled out his registration at college, he was permitted to attend lectures, and he continued just for the sake of self-advancement. Among such lectures was a handwriting class, and his talent in this then turned into the main factor on Mac’s User Interface.


Chapter 3 – Around in an apple field inspired them with the brand; an alternative lifestyle idea and potential performance created a firm.


It looks like a strange combination: a heavenly-brained, LSD expert, and the dignified computer sector. However, at the beginning of the seventies, plenty of people were just commencing to observe machines as a token of individual discipline.

Thus, at the time he was fascinated by medications and Zen, Jobs was hoping to start his private business. Furthermore, during the same period, his buddy Steve Wozniak suggested the concept of the contemporary PC.

During the beginnings of Silicon Valley’s tech advancement, Steve Wozniak became a member in the club named Homebrew Computer- a community in which computer “nerds” assembled to discuss opinions and there the comprehensive ideology was an alternative lifestyle and tech were an excellent match. 

It was in the club where Wozniak got his purpose. Computers for the period needed many, divided hardware parts to function, making them sophisticated to handle and hard to utilize. Wozniak pictured a machine as an enclosed box, having a keypad, monitor, and processor “all together”.

Firstly, Wozniak thought of granting his design without charge, since that was a norm of the Homebrew. Yet, Jobs was determinant that they must benefit from Wozniak’s device.

Therefore, around 1976, only with an initial fund of $1,300, Jobs and Wozniak established Apple Computer.

When the time arrived to name the company, Jobs had been to an apple field, and – since it wasn’t complicated, joy and casual – the brand “Apple” pierced. 

Jobs and Wozniak dove into work for 30 days making a hundred machines manually. 50 percent of the quantity was bought by a domestic computer trader and the rest to fellows and some individuals.



Within a month only, Apple’s first product, Apple I, had been on the brink of getting productive.

Jointly, Wozniak and Jobs were a strong group- Wozniak has been an engineering craftsman and Jobs was an idealist, who imagined that PCs could develop the globe.


Chapter 4 – Steve Jobs had been a predominant, moody manager, navigating with an inflexible love for perfection.


People who were personally close to Jobs would admit that Jobs was unpredictable, also a twisted person. If the job wasn’t according to his expectations, he would express anger waves and orally violate who’s around him.

Yet, what was the reason for Jobs being very predominating and moody?

Simply, he was a ruthless perfectionist. Jobs hoped for Apple II being perfectly made, a fully-featured machine that was assembled from the top to the bottom. Yet, although his motivation contributed to Apple II flourishment at the time of the launch in 1977, that sucked the extreme limits of potential and minds of the employees at the firm as well.

If Jobs saw a poor job done by a worker, he’d say that the work was “shit” by becoming angry if he also found the smallest imperfection.

While Apple was developing as a firm, Jobs just turned more unpredictable. Scott was finally assigned to Apple’s presidency, with the major mission of sustaining a closer eye on Jobs.

Mike Scott fundamentally had to face Steve Jobs with more difficult matters that other workers simply hadn’t the potential to perform. Such discussions usually ended in discord, seldom with Jobs falling apart crying, due to him realizing how greatly hard it is to let go of the management of Apple. 



Jobs saw it precisely depressing that Scott attempted to have restrained his perfectionism. Yet, for his role, Scott didn’t wish for his perfectionism to overcome pragmatism.

For example, Scott interfered when Jobs saw that not even one of the two thousand gradians of beige was fit for the incidence of Apple II when Jobs took more than a day to only choose the exact round shape of case corners. Scott’s main concern was to finish the case design and deliver it to the market. 

Nonetheless, since the firm was flourishing, such personal conflicts were kind of handleable. Yet, as you would find following, the status didn’t remain this way.


Chapter 5 – Then Macintosh gave Jobs a foundation for being a technology master, yet, his bitter criticism diminished him.


Apple II, having six million machines marketed, was seen as the light that drove the creation path of the personal computer world.

Nevertheless, according to Jobs, this was not a perfect accomplishment, for Apple II has been Wozniak’s invention, not just Jobs’s.

Jobs hoped to make a computer that would, as he said, create a difference in our universe. Taken by his eager desire, Jobs started to build the Macintosh – an advanced version of Apple II that would moreover modify PCs and nail Jobs as a technology master.

But the Macintosh had not been Jobs’s creation alone, as he, in fact, took the Macintosh program from its originator, Jef Raskin, a professional person in people-machine interfaces. Therefore, Jobs stole the concept and built a computer that worked on microprocessors that have the potential to host complicated graphics, that could be massively managed through a handheld device.

The Macintosh turned into an exceptional accomplishment, one reason is the generous advertisement campaign that found its way to TV commercials – nowadays it’s famous as an advertisement “1984” – managed by the famous moviemaker Ridley Scott from Holywood. Committed to the commercial’s fame, the Macintosh release created a sort of publicity series of reactions to Jobs for the computer.



Professional as always, Jobs could get enormous high-profile press meetings with various important journals, by seducing journalists into believing that the talk he was approving to have was “one-of-a-kind”.

His plan succeeded, and Macintosh contributed to Jobs’s fortune and fame. He had accomplished the type of popularity that could make Ella Fitzgerald, the singer, perform at his fantastic age-of-thirty birthday party.

Yet, such similar personality features that had made Jobs build Macintosh a development soon cost him his job as well.

His idealism and harsh attitude against the Apple community remained high. He would repeatedly call employees out as being “assholes” in case he saw that they weren’t paying attention to ideals.

Jobs’ presumptuous attitude caused a crisis in the firm. Around 1985, Apple’s council of managers decided to cast Jobs out.


Chapter 6 – Jobs failed in NeXT but got lucky in Pixar, a firm on top of animated movie production.


After Jobs pulled himself back together from losing his job at Apple, he knew he might at that time achieve things just as he desired – satisfying both his positive and negative characteristics.

First, he established a new machine that targeted the education sector, a computer named NeXT.

In the NeXT business, Jobs managed to satisfy his love for the plan. He spent a 100000 USD apartment expense to buy the logo and asserted that cases for NeXT be a complete cube.

However, Jobs’s perfection led the computer to be sophisticated to be programmed and built. This due to a fact that the cubed case sides should be manufactured alone, using patterns that worth 650000 USD.

Jobs’ unyielding mentality was the main NeXT’s failure signal. The product nearly exceeded the budget, the launch was late for many years, and eventually, the computer was too much above buyers’ affordability. Moreover, since its cost was high for a tiny coding library, the project hardly accomplished a difference in the huge computing sector.

At the same time, nevertheless, Jobs got the largest part of shares in an enterprise named Pixar. Being a Manager, Jobs celebrated in his participation in a business that had been a perfect organization of arts and tech.



At the end of 1988, Jobs dropped nearly 50 million USD to Pixar at the time when he lost finances because of NeXT.

Yet, after a long time of financial obstacles, the firm published Tin Toy, the movie that exhibited Pixar’s unparalleled insight for animation with computers. Tin Toy moved on to earn a prize for being a top short animation film in 1988.

Jobs, then, realized that he needed to change his passion from computer items, which were wasting budget, to Pixar, the firm that was going towards the top-listed, likely profitable animated movies.  

Finally, Pixar signed a partnership agreement with Disney in making its initial feature movie, Toy Story. Published around 1996, and it went as the best-profiting film in that year.

At the time Pixar became popular, Jobs’ shares (more than three-quarters of the firm) were priced above 20 multiplied his investment capital: a huge one point two billion USD.


Chapter 7 – Outside Apple, Jobs repaired his personal life, reaching out to his biological parents.


Adding to the 12 years of lessons in his career after Apple, Jobs had progressed in his personal life as well.

Around 1986, following his foster mother passed away, Jobs turned to curiosity to know his origins and made up his mind to look for his mother who gave birth to him.

When he eventually met Schieble who was nervous and regretful for leaving Jobs to the fosters. 

Jobs was amazed too to know that he got a sibling, Mona Simpson. The two of them, Jobs and Mona were people of art and determination, and they became close at the end.



Around 1996, Simpson released a novel titled A Normal Man. Its main character was created after Jobs and his several critical personality features. Yet, because he would not like to get upset with his newly found sibling, Jobs did not read the story.

In the same period, Jobs met Powell. They got married around 1991, having the grace of Steve’s Zen guru. The woman was previously carrying their baby in her, R. P. Jobs. These two would continue to have another two kids, Eve and Erin.

Having Powell’s support, Jobs tried to have time to meet with Lisa too, his daughter he has from an affair with a girl from whom he’d been separated from the early beginning.

Jobs did his best to become a better energetic parent for Lisa; and at last, she came to his house and stayed with Powell and Jobs till she graduated high school and went to Harvard.

She would be moody like Jobs, and as none of them was great at communication and making reparations, the two could spend months before they talk with each other.

Generally speaking, Jobs’s methodology of communicating with others in his personal life was the same as his attitude at the company. His concept was either zero or one: he would be very excited or very unfriendly.


Chapter 8 – When Apple’s wealth faded away, Jobs came back as a wasted sone to manage the firm as CEO.


During the time after Jobs’s release, Apple began to collapse as a business.

To stop this drop, Gil Amelio had been the CEO since 1996. Amelio realized that to save Apple back on track, it required to bring in the firm innovative concepts.

Thus, around 1997, Amelio decided to take NeXT’s software, completely appointing Jobs as a consultant to Apple.

When Jobs went back to Apple, he collected as much dominance as he might handle. As a result, he silently started to construct his leadership foundation by appointing his preferred staff from NeXT in Apple’s high positions.

At that time, Apple’s counsel knew that Amelio had not been a hopeful rescuer for Apple. Yet, they believed that the firm might have hope once more in Jobs.

Therefore, the council proposed the CEO seat to Jobs. unexpectedly, Jobs refused. Rather, he emphasized keeping his job as a consultant and assist in looking for another CEO.



Jobs benefited from his position as a consultant to rise his dominance inside Apple. He also made the council quit – the exact same council that had named him for the CEO position – for he saw them as delaying his efforts in changing the firm.

As a consultant, Jobs tackled to sign an affiliation with competitive Microsoft as well, making the firm build a special model of MS Office for Mac as well, then, closing ten years of juristic conflicts and driving AAPL to increase very rapidly.

Finally, and after a huge skepticism, Jobs took the CEO seat and asked that the firm re-concentrate on producing fewer items.

Jobs completed the licensing bargain that Apple signed with many different computer factories and chose to center the firm on producing only four prominent machines: laptops and desktops for professional and ordinary user mart.

Around 1997, Apple registered a drop of one point zero four billion USD, however, in 1998, when Jobs took over the CEO seat for a whole year, the business registered a surplus of 309 million USD. Steve definitely rescued the business.


Chapter 9 – Daring ideas and dreamy design contributed to iMac’s launch and the initial Apple Store’s enormous accomplishment.


When Jobs explored the dreamy skills of creator Jony Ive, Jobs appointed Jony the number two most authorized one at Apple, as Jobs was number one. Therefore, he started a companionship that would flourish as the most prominent manufacturing design cooperation of its time. 

The initial machine that Jony and Jobs produced was iMac, a 1200 USD desktop PC, which targeted ordinary users.

By creating iMac, Jony and Jobs faced the traditional concept that how a computer design should be. deciding on the blue, transparent case, the two illustrated their love for building the computer in perfection, from its inside assembly and the outside appearance. Such a design provided the computer with a cheerful look too.

Released around 1998, iMac turned out to be the quickest PC to run out of stocks in Apple’s time.

Yet, Jobs started to be anxious that Apple’s singular merchandise could be missed between the common goods inside a huge digital store. His resolution was to make Apple’s stores as a path to let the firm dominant the whole direct procedure.



Like Gateway Computers struggled financially when they launched its private direct stores, Apple council was justifiably against Jobs’s idea. Yet, with emphasis on his true concept, Jobs clinched to his weapon and the council agreed on a trial move for 4 Apple Stores.

Steve Jobs started to create a sample store, finishing it totally, and admiring each feature of service work and its beauty as a whole. He emphasized a notion of simplicity along with the procedure, from the minute a user logs the retailer to the minute they move to payment.

Around 2001, it was the opening of the initial Apple Store. That was a huge accomplishment, as Jobs’s accurate design had forced retailing and business visuals to a totally new scale.

Actually, the retailer in Manhattan would lastly turn to be the top-grossing store among any other in NYC, not forgetting the historic outlets like Saks 5th Avenue & Bloomingdale’s.


Chapter 10 – Wishing to dominate the whole digital profession, Jobs made iPad, iPod, and iPhone.


After his accomplishment at retail stores and iMac, Steve Jobs had this new, huge plan. His idea was a PC in the middle of different tech cultures.

He named that his tech hub plan.

The plan imagined a PC as a sort of focal point that manages various devices, including music players and video cams.

As the initial phase in thinking of his idea, Jobs chose that mobile music box might become the following item by Apple.

Around 2001, Apple launched the iPod, a streamlined design that connected the recent-popular circle click with a tiny monitor and totally different hard disk tech.

Experts were suspicious that users would pay $399 for a music box, yet, they brought an iPod so flushing that, when 2007 came to an end, iPod’s market fed Apple with 50 percent of revenues. 

The following phase was to shape an Apple cellular as Jobs was concerned that shortly, phones with music apps would affect the staring iPod negatively.



Around 2007, the company launched an initial version of an iPhone. 2 prominent techs contributed to the possibility of the iPhone: touching on the screen, may function many inputs at the same time, and the amazingly strong glass body, named Gorilla Glass.

Once more, experts were suspecting Apple’s plan, debating that it would be rare for users to give 500 USD for cellular – and once more Jobs showed their fallacy. In late 2010, gains from cellular sales exceeded 50 percent of the overall revenues recorded in the worldly mobile phone mart.

The last phase in Jobs’s plan was the launch of a tablet, iPad.

The company formally released an iPad around 2010. Yet, since Jobs had exposed the device before its distribution in markets, the media criticized it prior to trying it.

Even though at the time an iPad was formally launched, that was a huge accomplishment. Surely, Apple traded more than a million devices in one month in the beginning, and fifteen million for the following nine months.

Launching an iPod, iPad, and iPhone made it obvious that Jobs’s daring digital hub plan had flourished in shifting the customer techs manufacturing. 


Chapter 11 – Jobs’s emphasis on perfect, limited systems reflected his extremist love for dominance.


During the years of his professional life, Jobs sustained a limited, strong integrated system revealed in the best of what users see. Such an ideal mirrored Jobs’ obsession with dominance since by closing his designs for any change, he blocked users from updating them.

This desire for dominance produced a few big struggles – with Google and Microsoft in precise.

Bill Gates possessed another aspect for corporates and tech, in which he worked to license his firm’s software and OS to many contractor factories. Actually, Gates had also composed a system that is compatible with the Macintosh.

Yet, what was for one-time peaceful professional intercourse between Bill and Steve switched to years of long-timed struggle.

When gates created the Windows OS, Jobs attacked him for cloning Mac’s graphics. In fact, though, it was the concept of both systems that had been “borrowed” from a different tech firm named Xerox.

By the finish of his professional life, Jobs drove a campaign that confronts Google as well. In the firm’s form of its Android OS, Jobs suggested, Google had cloned several aspects of iPhones’ exclusive ones.

At the time when Google and Microsoft thought that unlimited operating systems and normal rivalry must specify which system would dominate, Jobs sustained till the last moment the sentence that both firms had taken ideas and features from Apple.



Yet, the aims of Jobs’ bitter critique weren’t just rival firms. Jobs persisted unrelentingly inside Apple for perfection, driving workers either to get fed up or released from their jobs. With Jobs there, it was no endurance at all for below-expectations-performance at Apple.

At times he believed that a person was not an “A-player”, who could not perform 90 hours per week, he’d usually don’t even warn them to get better, He’d immediately release them from their duties.

Moreover, when a firm was having a problem sending the demanded machine chips on the due date, Jobs rushed into a conference, shouting. This kind of habit was pretty diagnostic of Jobs’ sharply extreme perfection.


Chapter 12 – Jobs neglected all traditional knowledge about his cancer disease and passed away early around 2011.


Steve was informed about his cancer diagnosis in a randomly urological check around 2003.

Sadly, Jobs faced the issue of cancer in manners exactly how he faced an incomplete perfection: he neglected all traditional knowledge and chose to fight the disease by himself.

He rejected operation for almost a year and rather attempted to heal using middle-treatment and vegan nutritionist system. Through time, the stage of cancer advanced, and in the end, Jobs needed to get an urgent operation to eradicate it.

However, when cancer came back around 2008, he was once more determined to stick to a harsh nutrition system of specific veggies and fruits, which made him lose 40 pounds.

Finally, Jobs agreed to transfer livers, yet, after that, his condition got a dramatic shift to what he’d never get well again.

Steve passed away around 2011, leaving an extremely prominent tech firm on the globe.

All that Jobs achieved in his lifetime was a creation of his unbelievable power, and prior to his death, he announced: “I possessed a nice professional life, a nice private life and did anything I could do”.



Such nearly a unique person, Jobs’s character was completely mirrored in his productions, as each Apple device was a sealed exclusive, connected structure of software and hardware.

At the time when the open-plan implied by Microsoft – letting its Windows OS become authorized – drove them to control the OS sector for a long time, Jobs’s design confirmed its benefits through time, as it demonstrated a smooth, luxurious user experience from the top to the bottom.

Soon prior to passing away, Steve Jobs managed to see Apple, at last, bettering Microsoft being the worthiest technology firm in the globe.


Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Book Review


Steve Jobs was raised around Silicon Valley, a place crossing tech and arts, medications, and intelligence. He would bond a relationship that would drive him to establish Apple alongside a heavy transformation in the realm of techs. In his lifetime, Jobs was able to shift our connections with techs, designing several digital devices in an accurate shape and convenient interface.



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