"Stay hungry, stay foolish" – the life and legacy of Steve Jobs

On August 2, 2018, Apple shares rose to hit $207.05, making the computing giant the world’s first trillion-dollar public company. At that point its market capitalisation was bigger than the economies of Turkey and Switzerland. Not bad for a firm that was started in a garage by two guys named Steve.

Steve Wozniak was the genius engineer who created the original Apple products. It was Steve Jobs who brought them to the world. Jobs died on October 5, 2011, from pancreatic cancer, aged just 56. Last Monday, February 24, would have been Jobs’ 65th birthday.

Given his illness, Jobs’ death could not be called a surprise. However, I still remember seeing the news breaking on television and being rocked by it, not least because I love Apple products. His authorised biography by Walter Isaacson came out just three weeks after he died, Jobs controlling the narrative to the last.

It’s hard to underestimate the influence Jobs had during his lifetime, and continues to have during his death. It is telling that at least 141 patents, citing him as an inventor, have been granted posthumously. 

This is, after all, a man who was booted out of the company he founded, returned to restore it to greatness, and helped reinvent multiple industries. Among these is first foremost personal computing. Among plenty else, Apple created the first mainstream computers that had a Graphical User Interface, something that we now take for granted. There was the music industry too, with the advent of the iPod and, even more importantly, iTunes. The MP3 player allowed “a thousand songs in your pocket,” Jobs told delirious fans in a famous “and one more thing” moment, during one of his legendary “Stevenote” addresses. He later convinced the music industry to allow individual tracks to be available for 99 cents via iTunes, a major overhaul for an industry that tends to not like such things. He also created Pixar, the home of countless much-loved animation films, which is now part of Disney.  Then, of course, there is the smartphone. There had been smartphones before, but the iPhone indisputably changed the game. 

The list of achievements could go on and on. 

And yet the man who dreamed of perfect products was far from perfect himself. Whether it was his tendency to follow extreme diets or his ability to flare up into wild tempers, Isaacson’s book and other accounts make it clear Jobs was not an easy man to be around. According to one tale told by a former Apple employee, Jobs dropped the first iPod prototype into a fish tank after engineers tried to convince him it could not be made smaller. “Those are air bubbles,” he said as his employees’ hard work sunk beneath the surface. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”

The difficult reality is this stubbornness may well have also contributed to his death. We all know that pancreatic cancer has a tragically high mortality rate. However, Jobs regularly resisted conventional treatment, insisting he knew best and pursuing alternative therapies instead. It is an uncomfortable thought that we may well have had Jobs for at least a few more months or even years had he approached his illness in a different manner.

Yet his legacy lives on, not least in the products we use all day, every day. Perhaps the most crucial part of Jobs’ legacy comes in the form of his successor, Tim Cook. Cook served as COO while Jobs was CEO, standing in for his boss for two periods when he was ill. Seemingly knowing he was dying, Jobs handpicked Cook to take over from him full-time in the top job, not long before he passed away.

While the softly spoken and rather technocratic Cook will never replace Jobs in the hearts of Apple fans, it is Cook who was at the helm as Apple became the first trillion-dollar firm. It is he who is leading Apple as it moves from only selling products, to supplying a multitude of services, including original films and TV series with Apple TV+. He has also shifted the company philosophy a bit too, putting more emphasis on issues like climate change and charitable issues than Jobs ever did.

And yet nobody knows better than Cook himself that his predecessor remains a constant presence, wherever he goes. Indeed, key new products, including the iPhone 11 Pro, are announced in the Steve Jobs Theatre at Apple’s new Cupertino headquarters.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish,” Jobs told Stanford University’s Class of 2005. Those words, lifted from the back of a magazine, remain as powerful today as when Jobs first recalled them 15 years ago. Just another part of the legacy of the man who changed so much.