Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

Chapter One The “Passion” of Steve Jobs

Jony Ive noted that Steve Jobs had understood how important it was to nurture and clarify new ideas. “He treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence,” Jony said. “He understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily

The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.

‘Throughout his career,’ says Walter Isaacson, ‘Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness’ – such as IBM.16 It was for this reason that he craved perfection in his products; he would not settle for less. This also explains his very unusual policy of insisting Apple controll