Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

“That Day Has Come”
Jobs had many other ideas and projects that he hoped to develop. He wanted to disrupt the 
textbook industry and save the spines of spavined students bearing backpacks by creating 
electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad. He was also working with Bill Atkinson, his 
friend from the original Macintosh team, on devising new digital technologies that worked at the 
pixel level to allow people to take great photographs using their iPhones even in situations without 
much light. And he very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, 
music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an integrated 
television set that is completely easy to use,” he told me. “It would be seamlessly synced with all 
of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for 
DVD players and cable channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I 
finally cracked it.”
But by July 2011, his cancer had spread to his bones and other parts of his body, and his 
doctors were having trouble finding targeted drugs that could beat it back. He was in pain, 
sleeping erratically, had little energy, and stopped going to work. He and Powell had reserved a 
sailboat for a family cruise scheduled for the end of that month, but those plans were scuttled. He 
was eating almost no solid food, and he spent most of his days in his bedroom watching television.
In August, I got a message that he wanted me to come visit. When I arrived at his house, at mid
-morning on a Saturday, he was still asleep, so I sat with his wife and kids in the garden, filled 
with a profusion of yellow roses and various types of daisies, until he sent word that I should 
come in. I found him curled up on the bed, wearing khaki shorts and a white turtleneck. His legs 
were shockingly sticklike, but his smile was easy and his mind quick. “We better hurry, because I 
have very little energy,” he said.
He wanted to show me some of his personal pictures and let me pick a few to use in the book. 
Because he was too weak to get out of bed, he pointed to various drawers in the room, and I 
carefully brought him the photographs in each. As I sat on the side of the bed, I held them up, one 
at a time, so he could see them. Some prompted stories; others merely elicited a grunt or a smile. I 
had never seen a picture of his father, Paul Jobs, and I was startled when I came across a snapshot 
of a handsome hardscrabble 1950s dad holding a toddler. “Yes, that’s him,” he said. “You can use 
it.” He then pointed to a box near the window that contained a picture of his father looking at him 
lovingly at his wedding. “He was a great man,” Jobs said quietly. I murmured something along the 
lines of “He would have been proud of you.” Jobs corrected me: “He 
was
proud of me.”
For a while, the pictures seemed to energize him. We discussed what various people from his 
past, ranging from Tina Redse to Mike Markkula to Bill Gates, now thought of him. I recounted 
what Gates had said after he described his last visit with Jobs, which was that Apple had shown 
that the integrated approach could work, but only “when Steve is at the helm.” Jobs thought that 
was silly. “Anyone could make better products that way, not just me,” he said. So I asked him to 
name another company that made great products by insisting on end-to-end integration. He 
thought for a while, trying to come up with an example. “The car companies,” he finally said, but 
then he added, “Or at least they used to.”
When our discussion turned to the sorry state of the economy and politics, he offered a few 
sharp opinions about the lack of strong leadership around the world. “I’m disappointed in 
Obama,” he said. “He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss 
them off.” He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s not a 
problem I ever had.”
After two hours, he grew quiet, so I got off the bed and started to leave. “Wait,” he said, as he 
waved to me to sit back down. It took a minute or two for him to regain enough energy to talk. “I 
had a lot of trepidation about this project,” he finally said, referring to his decision to cooperate 
with this book. “I was really worried.”

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“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to 
know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write 
about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make 
sure someone heard what I had to say.”
He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what 
conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your 
book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a 
response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then 
it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad. 
Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.” By then, his eyes were closed and his energy 
gone, so I quietly took my leave.
As his health deteriorated throughout the summer, Jobs slowly began to face the inevitable: He 
would not be returning to Apple as CEO. So it was time for him to resign. He wrestled with the 
decision for weeks, discussing it with his wife, Bill Campbell, Jony Ive, and George Riley. “One 
of the things I wanted to do for Apple was to set an example of how you do a transfer of power 
right,” he told me. He joked about all the rough transitions that had occurred at the company over 
the past thirty-five years. “It’s always been a drama, like a third-world country. Part of my goal 
has been to make Apple the world’s best company, and having an orderly transition is key to that.”
The best time and place to make the transition, he decided, was at the company’s regularly 
scheduled August 24 board meeting. He was eager to do it in person, rather than merely send in a 
letter or attend by phone, so he had been pushing himself to eat and regain strength. The day 
before the meeting, he decided he could make it, but he needed the help of a wheelchair. 
Arrangements were made to have him driven to headquarters and wheeled to the boardroom as 
secretly as possible.
He arrived just before 11 a.m., when the board members were finishing committee reports and 
other routine business. Most knew what was about to happen. But instead of going right to the 
topic on everyone’s mind, Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer, the chief financial officer, went 
through the results for the quarter and the projections for the year ahead. Then Jobs said quietly 
that he had something personal to say. Cook asked if he and the other top managers should leave, 
and Jobs paused for more than thirty seconds before he decided they should. Once the room was 
cleared of all but the six outside directors, he began to read aloud from a letter he had dictated and 
revised over the previous weeks. “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no 
longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,” it 
began. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”
The letter was simple, direct, and only eight sentences long. In it he suggested that Cook 
replace him, and he offered to serve as chairman of the board. “I believe Apple’s brightest and 
most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its 
success in a new role.”
There was a long silence. Al Gore was the first to speak, and he listed Jobs’s accomplishments 
during his tenure. Mickey Drexler added that watching Jobs transform Apple was “the most 
incredible thing I’ve ever seen in business,” and Art Levinson praised Jobs’s diligence in ensuring 
that there was a smooth transition. Campbell said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes as the 
formal resolutions transferring power were passed.
Over lunch, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller came in to display mockups of some products that 
Apple had in the pipeline. Jobs peppered them with questions and thoughts, especially about what 
capacities the fourth-generation cellular networks might have and what features needed to be in 
future phones. At one point Forstall showed off a voice recognition app. As he feared, Jobs 
grabbed the phone in the middle of the demo and proceeded to see if he could confuse it. “What’s 
the weather in Palo Alto?” he asked. The app answered. After a few more questions, Jobs 
challenged it: “Are you a man or a woman?” Amazingly, the app answered in its robotic voice, 
“They did not assign me a gender.” For a moment the mood lightened.
When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that HP had 
suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber and declared 

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that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought 
they had left it in good hands,” he said. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It’s 
tragic. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple.” As he prepared to 
leave, the board members gathered around to give him a hug.
After meeting with his executive team to explain the news, Jobs rode home with George Riley. 
When they arrived at the house, Powell was in the backyard harvesting honey from her hives, with 
help from Eve. They took off their screen helmets and brought the honey pot to the kitchen, where 
Reed and Erin had gathered, so that they could all celebrate the graceful transition. Jobs took a 
spoonful of the honey and pronounced it wonderfully sweet.
That evening, he stressed to me that his hope was to remain as active as his health allowed. “I’
m going to work on new products and marketing and the things that I like,” he said. But when I 
asked how it really felt to be relinquishing control of the company he had built, his tone turned 
wistful, and he shifted into the past tense. “I’ve had a very lucky career, a very lucky life,” he 
replied. “I’ve done all that I can do.”

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