In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

Steve Jobs - the brain behind the famous Apple products died on the 5th of October, 2011. Everyone is aware of this and if you'll agree with me, his death is a great loss to the IT world. The purpose this article is mainly to give a brief history about his life as well as show you some quotes from him.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations. - VIA

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.

Steve's Background
Steven Paul Jobs was born on the 24th of February, 1955 but he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View within Carlifornia's Silicon Valley. He was born out of wedlock but his biologican parents eventually got married and gave birth to another daughter named Mona Simpson. He graduated from high school in the year 1972 and then enroled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He later dropped out after one semester and in his own words after he dropped out he said "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy courses in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

We’ve gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time. - ABC News

His biological parents go by the name Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah 'John' Jandali. Both of them were graduates from the University of Winscosin. His father was a Syrian political science professor and his mother worked as a speech therapist.

As a boy, Steven and his dad would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to dismantle and recouple electronics and this is one of the hobbies that made Steve achieve so much success.

Steve was always an innovative and intelligent thinker; although he had troubles in his youth over formal schooling. He was a prankster whose fourth grade teacher had to bribe to study but he was very intelligent still.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

After he enrolled in high school, Steve spent his free time at Hewlett-Packard(HP) and it was there he met the computer club wizard - Steve Wozniak, who was a brilliant computer engineer. The duo developed a big respect for one another

Apple Computers
Steve enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon, dropped out and spent 18 months dropping in on creative classes after 6 months. He then developed love for typography.
In 1974, Jobs got a job as a video game designer with Atari and then left Atari several months later to find spiritual enlightenment in India experimenting with psychedelic drugs around continents.

It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do

At the age of 21, Jobs and Wozniak started Apple Computers in the Job's family garage. Their entrepreneurial venture was then sponsored by revenue from the sale of Steve's Volkswagen bus and Wozniak's scientific calculator.

Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making the machines smaller, cheaper and accessible to everyday consumers.
The first series of user-friendly personal computers that they made sold for $666.66
The first model, the Apple I, earned them $774,000.
With the release of their second model - Apple II, sales increased by 700%

I want to put a ding in the universe.

Steve Left Apple. Why?
At a point in time, Apple suffered substantial design flaws. This resulted in recalls and consumer dissapointment. As a result of this, IBM surpassed Apple sales and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC dominated business world. In 1984 Apple released the Apple Macintosh with the aim of making it a piece of a counter culture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative.
In 1985, Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO to begin a new hardware and software company called NeXT, Inc.
The following year he then purchased an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation Studios.

I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.

Reinventing Apple
Despite Pixar's success, NeXT, Inc. floundered in its aattempts to sell its speciaalized operating system to mainstream America and Apple eventually bought the company in 1977 for $429 million and then Steve returned to his post as Apple's CEO the same year.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

Pancreatic Cancer