Steve Jobs secretly left years' 'worth of plans' for Apple before his tragic death -

Innovator Steve Jobs was said to have been working on Apple’s future, even though he knew that he may not be alive to see them become reality.

Steve Jobs changed the world overnight a quarter of a century ago. He took to the stage at Macworld back in 2007 with something in his pocket that changed how we saw cell phones forever. 40 years ago, in 1984, Steve Jobs said Apple changed the computer industry when they introduced the Macintosh. In 2001, they did the same again, causing ripples in the music world with the iPod. Then, only six years later, they performed a hat trick with the iPhone. The tech inventor died on October 5, 2011, but Jobs had plans for the company he founded, even if he’d never be there to enjoy them.

Steve Jobs and Apple – the rise and fall

Jobs was known to be difficult to work with and for – that’s no secret. But he’s been touted as one of the best entrepreneurs of our time.

Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne started Apple as a partnership in 1976. Jobs was only 20 years old at the time, and they set up in his parents’ garage. In a decade, they transformed from the garage into a $2 billion company with 4,000 employees.

In 1983, they hired CEO John Sculley, who previously worked at PepsiCo. But him joining the business ended up being bad news for Jobs. After clashing with Sculley, and two new products bombing in sales, the innovator was moved away from Macintosh in the company. This made him furious.

Steve Jobs took his case to Apple’s board of directors with a huge rant. Jobs say he was fired immediately, but Scuelly’s side of the story says it happened after. Even so, he was out.

Eventually he founded another computer business, NeXT, and sold it back to Apple in 1996. This meant he was back at the place he once loved. But the company’s stock price plummeted after a huge stock sale. The then CEO, Gil Amelio, was let go, and Apple’s board replaced him with Steve Jobs. A full circle moment.

Five years later, they came out with the iPod – and the rest is history.

Steve’s second chance with Pixar

He wasn’t afraid of imperfections, though, despite not owning up to what went wrong. When he and the co-founders at Pixar wanted to be one step ahead they changed the culture from the inside, it was one of imperfection. Instead of working on a product continuously and releasing it when you feel it’s ready only to find out all the errors and possible fixes you need to make, they went about it in another way. They shared progress every day by sharing imperfect work, so they could fix the small failures and ‘crises’. Pixar did this continuously, so that by the time it went to market, it was closer to perfection than it’ll ever be.

At the beginning of Pixar, they weren’t setting out to make the beloved animated movies we know today. Not the celebrity-filled stars we saw in films across the industry. Hollywood had actors on the silver screen, not cartoons. They wanted to stay in the tech market and attempted to sell the Pixar Image Computer. But it didn’t exactly work out. The sales were low, less than 300 sold, and they were too expensive for consumers. But Jobs was patient. He knew it’d take time for Pixar to become a successful company.

He also was sold Ed Catmull’s dream of the first animated feature film. So they sold off the hardware division and pivoted to producing animated commercials. Business experts today even speak of the ‘pivot’ motion in companies, and to quote Seth Godin, they stumbled upon their Purple Cow.

The company formed a relationship with Disney and turned it to a lucrative $26 million deal for three animated films. And it worked. The company’s never had a flop. Each Pixar movie has made a profit, with Finding Nemo raking in a billion dollars.

Secret plans for Apple after his death

Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. He said doctors told him it was incurable, and he wouldn’t live longer than six months. But, a biopsy later that day showed it was a rare form of cancer that was in fact curable.

He survived eight years before his health deteriorated related to the disease. His cause of death was noted as respiratory arrested related to the tumor. He was 56.

The world stopped to take a breath when the news broke. Even though Steve Jobs knew he was dying, he worked on Apple products in his final months of his time alive, because, he believed, they would protect the company’s future. He even worked to get plans approved for a spaceship-style company in California – it’s hard to imagine what that’d become if Jobs’ dreams came true. Would we have another SpaceX type of business going head-to-head with Elon Musk and NASA?

For more than a year before his death, he worked on projects for Apple. He also oversaw the development of the iCloud project, which sparked change in how users organize their photos, documents and music.

In 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The entrepreneur once said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

‘You’ve got to find what you love’

Six years before his death, Steve Jobs’ famous speech at Stanford University inspired millions more than the students graduating on the day.

He spoke of his adopted parents keeping their wish to his biological mother by sending him to college. But, he didn’t know he wanted to do in life, so he dropped out.

He said: “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.

“It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

Instead, he dropped ‘in’ on classes he wanted to do while couch-surfing. He ended up taking a calligraphy class that wouldn’t show its use for 10 years. When designing the first Macintosh they invented the first computer with that ‘beautiful’ typography.

He also discussed his very ‘public’ firing from Apple. But he knew deep down, he wouldn’t have sold NeXT to Apple, or Pixar to Disney, if it didn’t happen.

“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,” he admitted. “It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.”

Jobs added: “Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”