Steve Jobs: Remembering the Dissatisfied Man

Many famous Steve Jobs moments involve him speaking before enraptured audiences. One of my most vivid Jobs memories is of the time I saw him standing quietly at the back of one.

I attended the Siggraph computer-graphics conference in Boston in 1989 and was trapped in a throng on the show floor watching one of Pixar’s short cartoons. (The company hadn’t yet started making feature-length ones and wasn’t yet a cherished icon of American entertainment.) The person next to me happened to be Jobs, who had bought George Lucas’ graphics division in 1985 and bootstrapped it into independent existence as Pixar.

(See photos of the long and extraordinary career of Steve Jobs.)

I’m not sure if anyone else noticed him watching the movie and observing the crowd — they were too busy being entertained. He beamed with quiet satisfaction, wearing the same catlike grin he did at the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984. In recent years, as I attended Apple product launches where Jobs was the center of attention, I saw it repeatedly.

And yet satisfaction is nowhere on the list of words that leap to mind as I think about Jobs’ life and career. He was famously dissatisfied — with products under development, with the people who reported to him, with Apple’s competitors and partners, with the way the technology industry worked, with life in general.

I found that smile of contentment more compelling than the praise (“insanely great!”) Jobs routinely bestowed on Apple products. It looked utterly sincere. But it was also fleeting. A Jobs who had kept on being pleased with Pixar as it existed in 1989 would never have instigated the changes that made Toy Story possible, just as a Jobs who was happy with Apple’s lot in life in 2001 would never have presided over a decade’s worth of ambitious expansion.

(Watch a video of Jobs’ greatest keynotes.)

To me, the most remarkable thing about his career wasn’t the Apple II, the Mac, Pixar, the Apple Store, the iPod, iTunes, the iPad or any of the other blockbusters he guided into existence — even though any one of them would have been enough to assure a place in the history of business and technology. (Steve “Woz” Wozniak contributed to only one of these hits, the Apple II, and will be rightly revered for it forever.) Rather, it’s the durability and consistency of his vision that is astonishing.

When Jobs co-founded Apple with Woz in 1976, he was 21, and the personal-computer industry barely extended beyond the meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, the Silicon Valley institution that counted Jobs and Woz among its regulars. By 1977, the Apple II was on the market, and Jobs was perhaps the most influential figure in the business. What were the chances that he would still dominate it 34 years later — not by riding out his successes but by restlessly moving on to the next big thing, again and again?

See the top 10 Apple moments.

Read more about the life and legacy of Steve Jobs in the tribute book from TIME — Steve Jobs: The Genius Who Changed Our World

Jobs didn’t stay relevant by changing with the times so much as by sticking to his principles until the rest of the world caught up with them, along with the capabilities of processors, displays, communications components and other technologies. In the 1970s, he thought the Apple II should be a consumer’s electronics device rather than a piece of computing equipment, and he was willing to strip out features people thought they wanted rather than do them badly. It worked then, and it worked a generation later when the iPad sprung from the same philosophy.

If he hadn’t been so unimaginably stubborn, the world would be a meaningfully different place today. It wasn’t all that long ago, for instance, that some “experts” believed Apple should ditch the Mac and start building fancy Windows PCs — a strategy that might have helped the company’s bottom line in the short run but would have snuffed out the iPhone and iPad before they even existed.

(Watch TIME’s video “Steve Jobs’ Career at Apple (in Two Minutes).”)

For all of the simplicity of Jobs’ instincts and the undeniable success of the products that resulted from them, he still confuses people. A meaningful percentage of Apple observers find the magnitude of the company’s success over the past decade impossible to process. They remember the Jobs who was squeezed out of Apple in 1985, the one who appeared to have lost the PC wars to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the one who in 1997 returned to an Apple so fragile that some pundits thought the main question was whether he’d be able to prop it up for a few more years.

Jobs never stopped being a control freak, but anyone who still thinks that was a liability stopped paying attention years ago. And anyone who still believes that the typical Apple customer is a Steve Jobs Mini-Me should visit an Apple Store and spy on the consumers milling about. They look like real people of all sorts to me, not style-obsessed cultists.

(Read “The Beginning of the Post–Steve Jobs Era.”)

For years, the conventional wisdom on Jobs’ relationship with Apple was that his micromanaging ways had left it in shaky condition to thrive without him. The fact that it flourished over the past three years, during Jobs’ two extended medical leaves, suggests that wasn’t true. Under the new CEO, Tim Cook, the company stands an excellent chance of continuing to be vital, profitable and influential for years to come.

Apple has every reason to be proud of its co-founder’s dazzling legacy. But if it ever spends too much time celebrating it, we’ll know it’s lost its way. May it continue, like Steve Jobs, to find only brief moments of satisfaction in the way things are and have been — an edgy, dissatisfied company less interested in its current success and storied past than in its boundless potential.

Read more about the life and legacy of Steve Jobs in the tribute book from TIME — Steve Jobs: The Genius Who Changed Our World

See TIME’s Steve Jobs covers.

See the 10 Apple products that defined Steve Jobs’ career.