Steve Jobs: The iPod carrier

By rights, Apple should have folded years ago, taking its university drop-out founder down with it. Instead, both boss and company are thriving, with their cheap version of the revolutionary iPod technology set to consign the CD to history...

When Steve Jobs, the founder and head of Apple Computer, takes the stage at the start of the annual Macworld Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday wearing his trademark uniform of black jeans and sweater, look for a tell-tale white wire reaching from his ears to his waist. While his task under the lights will be to evangelise rather than to listen to music, chances are he will be sporting an iPod.

Everyone will want to know: are the rumours true? If press reports from the last few days are to be believed, Jobs, 48, will be taking the wraps off a new, basic iPod, the music-downloading toy that was first introduced by Apple in 2001. Unlike the £300 iPods available now, which can reap 10,000 songs from the internet, this latest model will hold only about 800 tracks. But at just £65, it will be affordable for most people.

This would be no small moment, and another step towards relegating CDs to museums. The iPod is already revolutionising how we listen to music and how recording labels market it. Almost more important than the machine, however, is iTunes, the library of songs launched on the web by Apple in the US last April and soon to be available in Britain. Time magazine recently called iTunes the Invention of the Year for 2003. So far, 25 million songs have been downloaded from it.

Jobs, then, has cause to dance, whether or not his iPod is switched on. Other additions to Apple's lines of sleekly designed iMac and iBook desktop and notebook computers have been well received. More will be announced in San Francisco. And then there is the latest triumph of the second company he heads, Pixar Studios. Its blockbuster Finding Nemo became the highest-grossing animated film of all time last year, with a box-office take of $340m (£190m) plus another $400m in VCR and DVD sales so far.

That Jobs, a university drop-out, has managed to reach such heights is almost baffling. By rights, Apple should no longer exist. It is not just that it almost went under in 1995, after a 10-year period without Jobs at the helm. It also resolutely stuck with its own computer operating systems, when all the odds were stacked against them. Overwhelmed by the hegemony of Bill Gates's Microsoft Windows system, its machines, with their own Apple system, command only 3 per cent of the world PC market. Yet Apple is thriving again, partly because of the design beauty of its products and the ardent loyalty of its followers, many of them in the graphics, publishing, arts and music businesses.

Born in February 1955, Steven Paul Jobs was an orphan adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, who raised him in Los Altos, California, a town that was later to become part of Silicon Valley. At school, he was a "loner", according to one former teacher, who "always had a different way of looking at things". His interest in electronics surfaced early. Jobs took summer work at Hewlett-Packard, where he made friends with Stephen Wozniak, an engineering whiz-kid five years his senior.

It was after dropping out from university in Oregon that Jobs began showing up at Wozniak's Homebrew Computer Club to tinker with electronics. Soon afterwards Jobs persuaded Wozniak to join him in building a personal computer. Working out of Jobs's garage, they got their break when a local electronics retailer ordered 25 of the rudimentary machines. To finance building them, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his prized Hewlett-Packard calculator. They called the machine Apple.

The company grew quickly, decamping to a cluster of buildings in Cupertino, California, where it is still headquartered today. An Apple II surfaced one year later and over three years amassed earnings of $139m. By the early 1980s, however, Apple had an uphill struggle competing with IBM, which had muscled into the market with the PC. The Apple and the PC were not compatible and market share began to slide.

The greatest landmark in the company's history came 20 years ago last month, with the launch of the Macintosh, with built-in screen and, most importantly, a mouse-and-click user interface. At last, computers were friendly to the average user, who no longer had to type in obscure commands to carry out tasks. Screen icons were born. (Microsoft sold its first Windows 1.0 system in 1985.) Jobs, always a master of marketing, propelled sales with a TV campaign featuring an athlete being chased by storm troopers past throngs of vacant-eyed workers and hurling a sledgehammer at a menacing face staring out of a screen. The message was that 1984 would not be Orwell's but Apple's. Jobs once remarked: "We started out to get a computer in the hands of everyday people, and we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

But Jobs was about to be cast into the wilderness. John Sculley, whom he had hired from Pepsi-Cola to be Apple's president, engineered his ousting in 1985, claiming the company no longer had any use for him. Indeed, Jobs - Wozniak had already departed by this time - was being described as an oppressive figure in the company, prone to bullying and violent temper tantrums. In 1989, Jobs tried to do it all over again, forming a new computer company called NextStep. NextStep was ultimately to be a disappointment. But he had also used some of his fortune to buy Pixar from the Star Wars director, George Lucas.

The second coming of Jobs began nearly 10 years ago. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story establishing it as a Hollywood powerhouse. A year later, a stumbling Apple contacted him about coming back. By early 1997, he was once more in control. Wall Street was wary, but Jobs moved quickly to energise Apple's products, with the introduction of iMac desktops with translucent bodies in different colours. By 1998, Apple was back in profit. Prosperity has returned to the Cupertino campus.

Jobs reveals little about his private life. He eschews society events and politics. Ask Apple's press people about him and they will politely demur from helping. Ask us about the products, they respond, not about Jobs. At 23, he became a father to a daughter, Lisa, with a woman he did not marry. He has three more children with his wife, Laurene, whom he married in 1991. Both are vegetarians. In contrast to his fellow computer king Gates, we know almost nothing about any philanthropic activities; however, his fortune is said to exceed $1bn.

We do know what he has achieved in business, however. And he has done it in the comparative blink of an eye that has been the up-and-down life of Silicon Valley. Those garage days were only 27 years ago, after all. "If you asked me to name the five people who have had the biggest impact on the tech industry and the growth of technology in Silicon Valley at least two names come up: one is Bob Noyce [a co-founder of Intel] and the other is Steve Jobs," said Larry Sonsini, a confidante of Jobs who serves on the Pixar board.

Jobs recently said he would get bored if he could not keep innovating. The new world of the iPod and its sister venture iTunes should keep him entertained for some time yet. When the final biographies are written, Jobs may be remembered as much for introducing the world to a new way of listening to music - and taking us beyond the CD - as for his pioneering of the personal computer.