American Icon

Photograph by Norman Seeff

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The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching a start-up in the proverbial garage and building it into the world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many things outright, but he was a master at arranging ideas, art and technology in ways that repeatedly invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphic interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand...

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