There’s plenty to like, admire, and definitely dislike about Steve Jobs, but he did an incredible job saving Apple, and will forever be treated like a rock star.

The greatest thing that Gil Amelio, Apple’s fifth CEO, ever did was pave the way for Steve Jobs to become its sixth. It was great for Apple, it was great for users, but it was probably horrible for Amelio himself.

That’s because what he did was have Apple acquire Steve Jobs’s failed NeXT firm. As part of that acquisition he got Jobs as no more than an advisor.

He must surely have guessed that Jobs wanted more. When Amelio was just a board member, Jobs had asked him to support an ousting of the then-CEO. Jobs wanted Amelio’s backing to take over the company.

Jobs didn’t get it then, and he didn’t get it when Amelio later bought NeXT. But by then, Jobs was both savvy enough about business, and popular enough with Apple staff, that he didn’t need anyone’s help to take over.

He just needed some time and a bit of leverage.

Apple bought NeXT for about $400 million and it was specifically so it could base the next Mac OS on that firm’s NeXTStep operating system. NeXT had brilliant software and excellent hardware, but it had failed at both and was going nowhere.

So maybe being bought by Apple was a lifeline. Or maybe it was the plan all along.

As presented in Aaron Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs” film, it’s possible that Steve Jobs had being acquired by Apple in mind the whole time. For all its strengths, that film is not noted for its accuracy, but it’s a possibility that fits with Jobs having gone to Amelio.

Yet speaking about his return much later, Jobs made it sound like the whole thing was unexpected and perhaps even unwanted.

“When I was trying to decide whether to come back to Apple or not I struggled. I talked to a lot of people and got a lot of opinions,” Jobs said in 2001. “And then there I was, late one night, struggling with this and I called up a friend of mine at 2am.”

“I said, ‘should I come back, should I not?’ and the friend replied, ‘Steve, look. I don’t give a f*ck about Apple. Just make up your mind’ and hung up,” continued Jobs. “It was in that moment that I realized I truly cared about Apple.”

People change their minds, people misremember details, and people lie. Gil Amelio would probably presume the latter in Steve Jobs’s case, because Jobs allegedly did lie to him.

As part of that deal to buy NeXT, Steve Jobs was personally give shares in Apple, on the promise that he wouldn’t sell them. Shortly afterwards, just about exactly that number of shares were sold and despite Amelio and the industry suspecting it was Jobs, he denied it.

But later, legal and financial reporting laws meant the seller was identified and it was Jobs. The move was seemingly part of his signalling to investors that Apple was not a good buy, and that was something he knew would be heard by the company’s board.

It wasn’t a simple series of steps, and there was much more involved than we may ever know, but Jobs worked steadily to make sure that Amelio was fired.

Once the board fired Amelio, it needed a new CEO and, oh look, here’s one. Here’s a man who knows Apple more than anyone, and has been the CEO of NeXT, which was a huge corporation.

Jobs gets the job

Yet reportedly, Steve Jobs did not lobby to become CEO, and he even asked to not be considered for the role. He asked to be involved in choosing Amelio’s replacement.

It’s hard to be sure of his plan, or even whether he truly had one or was just lurching from opportunity to opportunity. But if you want a job, sometimes the last thing you should do is be visibly keen to get it.

Especially if you are already in a situation where you might as well have the role because you are already taking on all of the responsibility. Certainly from the time that Amelio left, and maybe even earlier, Apple was being run by Steve Jobs.

Apple called it buying NeXT, but NeXT claimed it was a merger – image credit: NeXT

It was also being staffed by him, as he put many ex-NeXT people into key roles. That must have stung existing Apple employees, especially since 3,000 of them were laid off in the February after Jobs returned.

In September 1997, Steve Jobs declared himself the interim CEO, the iCEO. He would stay as that until Macworld Expo in 2000, which is when he formally announced having become Apple’s proper CEO.

Getting to work

He didn’t wait for any title, though, as he immediately got to work trying to bring Apple back from the brink of financial ruin. You can argue that he was petty in cancelling projects like the Newton, but he was also doing it from necessity.

Apple was 90 days or so away from bankruptcy, and the steps Jobs took are the only reason the company survived that time. That includes the then shocking deal he made with Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

That deal is usually presented as being how Microsoft saved Apple. Bill Gates agreed to invest $150 million in Apple, and to develop Microsoft Office for Mac for the following five years.

It is true that Apple needed this. It also needed to be free of the costly litigation that was going on between it and Microsoft over how Windows was copying the Mac.

Jobs must have seen that Apple was not going to win that fight, even if it should have, so he let it go in order to cut that expense. Separately, Microsoft was in trouble with the Department of Justice, though, over being allegedly a monopoly.

By having a Mac version of Office as well as the Windows one, Microsoft could and did make the case that was competing like any other firm.

So it was a win/win for Apple and Microsoft, it was a win/win for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But at this time, Mac users and Window users were oil and water, and having the Apple founder appear to bow to the maker of Windows, was not popular.

Jobs could’ve thought ahead about the optics of it all, too. Gates did not come to the event, which was one bad point, and he did a video call instead, which proved to be a worse one.

Bill Gates appeared on an enormous screen, totally dominating the stage and sending every signal possible that Windows was king. He spoke briefly, but the visuals were the thing.

That did make it look as if Apple was over. That it might continue without going bankrupt, but maybe it would never be the same Apple again.

Never the same Apple

It was never the same again. It was better.

Jony Ive was promoted to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, and by 1998 he had created the iMac. You can point to several devices that saved Apple, including the iPod and the iPhone, but the first one was the iMac.

That was released on May 6, 1998, and it came with a new focus. “Even though this is a full-blooded Macintosh,” said Jobs at its launch, “we are targeting this for the #1 use consumers tell us they want a computer for, which is to get on the Internet, simply and fast.”

But Apple was also focusing on something else. “Apple will be working on strengthening its brand name,” Jobs told a financial site when the iMac launched. He specifically compared Apple to Nike, Disney and Sony, and that focus worked.

We know that now because of how incredibly well known the Apple brand is. But while that took time, Apple made it seem inexorable. By 2017, Interbrand named Apple the year’s most valuable brand, for the fifth year in a row.

That was more significant than perhaps it seems, and it was certainly more important than rival technology firms thought. What the iMac brought was a concentration on what users would use it for, rather than what great technology it could have.

If any one thing describes Apple, both under Steve Jobs and later, it’s this. That design is more than what something looks like, it is how it is used.

“The one thing Apple’s providing now is leadership in colors,” Bill Gates said of the iMac, entirely missing the point. “It won’t take long for us to catch up with that, I don’t think.”

It says a lot that Gates, head of the practically totally dominant Windows firm, was even asked to comment about Apple at this point. It says a lot, too, that he meant it about catching up.

Microsoft, back then, had no reason to compete with Apple except perhaps a bit of pride. Anything they can do, we can do better, appears to have been at the forefront of Microsoft’s collective mind.

So yes, within weeks there were colorful PCs from all sorts of manufacturers. They didn’t change a single thing about Windows, they just used some color plastic on the case instead of beige.

The iPod changes Apple

Originally, Apple never crossed Microsoft’s mind as it worked with vendors around the year 2000. It was working with them to create MP3 music players around its Windows Media Player.

But then in 2001, Steve Jobs launched the iPod and changed everything, eventually. It was typical Apple, which means typical Jobs, in that it was far from the first MP3 music player, but it was profoundly better than anything that came before it.

Initially just for Mac users, the iPod would go on to work with Windows too, and Microsoft was not happy. It could have carried on with other partners, it didn’t have to make its own rival to the iPod, but for one illustration of why it did, there’s a now famous email.

“I have to tell you my experience with our software and this device Creative’s Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra is really terrible,” wrote Windows Vista development chief Jim Allchin in a 2003 internal email. “Apple is just so far ahead. How can we get the [firms] to create something that is competitive with the iPod? I looked at the Dell system and that is not close either.”

Allchin could have looked closer to home and reexamined Windows Media Player. But over and over again, Microsoft recognized where Apple was superior, and failed to match it despite trying.

For instance, Microsoft probably wasn’t trying to copy Apple when it first attempted to launch an online music store. It was more likely that it wanted some of the action that Napster was getting, but then it saw how the iTunes Music Store was working.

So Microsoft famously introduced the Zune and the less-remembered Zune Marketplace to compete with little Apple. If you need an example of Microsoft thinking of technology and never users, there’s its PlaysForSure program.

There were competing music formats, there were digital rights issues, it was surprisingly complex at the time. Apple hid all of that complexity, Apple made everything seamless for users.

And Microsoft launched its PlaysForSure program. If you got a portable digital player with the PlaysForSure logo on it, you knew you were good to go.

Except Microsoft’s own Zune player didn’t work with it.

Apple had been dying, then under Steve Jobs it was punching far above its weight in terms of industry recognition. Then with the iMac and especially the iPod, and especially against this kind of startlingly poor competition, Apple was becoming the one to beat.

Steve Jobs destroyed the iPod

It took Microsoft years before it abandoned the worthless Zune. In comparison, the iPod was an enormous success, yet under Steve Jobs, Apple killed the iPod.

Apple deliberately destroyed what had been one of the most incredibly lucrative devices made up to that point. And it did it because where other firms would be doubling down on a hit, Apple was looking to what Jobs felt was certain to come next.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. You can say that the rest is history, but it’s economic history, it’s business history, and it is social history.

Growing Apple

Before Jobs, John Sculley had done a remarkable job as CEO, increasing Apple’s fortunes, before those fortunes rather went away again. After Jobs, Tim Cook raised its fortunes by a staggering amount to make Apple the biggest company in the world.

Between them, Steve Jobs also increased Apple’s financial fortunes. He raised it by more than Sculley, it raised it by less than Cook, but he raised it at the single most crucial time in Apple’s history.

In 2009, Steve Jobs was named the best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review, for how he’d increased Apple’s income.

“The #1 CEO on the list, Steve Jobs, delivered a whopping 3,188% industry-adjusted return (34% compounded annually) after he rejoined Apple as CEO in 1997, when the company was in dire shape,” said the magazine. “From that time until the end of September 2009, Apple’s market value increased by $150 billion.”

Shortly after that report, Apple under Steve Jobs launched the iPad. At times it’s been mocked for being just a large iPhone, at other times it’s been criticized as a media consumption device, but there is still no tablet to rival it.

The iPad took longer to become a hit, and it never became the success the iPhone did, but it was a key part of Steve Jobs’s era.

It was also the last major product released during his time.

Steve Jobs steps down

Steve Jobs was the sixth CEO of Apple. Of his predecessors, Mike Markkula stepped aside for John Sculley, but every other one was fired.

Doubtlessly, Steve Jobs would not have stepped down for anyone, and equally certainly, no Apple board would ever have fired him.

But on August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs quit as CEO. He’d already had leaves of absence over health issues, during which Tim Cook became acting CEO.

Now his failing health was too much and Cook became his full-time replacement. Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, aged 56. The cause of death was officially respiratory arrest, but the underlying cause was his “metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor.”

“I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it,” Jobs had written in his resignation letter. He also told his team, particularly Tim Cook, that they should never look back.

He told them to not ask “what would Steve do.”

You have to imagine that they do ask that, that they do all wonder that, at least at times. But during his time as CEO, Steve Jobs set up Apple for the future, and protected it from ever coming so close to failing again.

It was time for Tim Cook to shape what happened next.

Apple at 50: How each of its CEOs shaped the company

In February 2026, workers at Sama, a Nairobi-based outsourcing company contracted by Meta, told Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten that they had been reviewing footage captured by users of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. The footage included people having sex, going to the toilet, undressing, and handling bank details. The workers’ job was to label the content so that Meta’s AI systems could learn to interpret what the glasses see. Less than two months after the investigation was published, Meta ended its contract with Sama, and on 16 April the company issued formal redundancy notices to 1,108 employees. Meta said Sama “don’t meet our standards.” Sama rejected the characterisation and said it had received no notification of any failure. Naftali Wambalo, co-founder of the Africa Tech Workers Movement, alleged the real reason was simpler: Meta was retaliating against the workers who spoke out. Meta has not responded to that allegation. The people who trained the AI saw what the glasses see. Then they lost their jobs.

The glasses

Meta sold more than seven million pairs of Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025, more than tripling its previous year’s volume. The product line has since expanded to include prescription models designed to reach the billions of people who already buy corrective eyewear, converting what was a novelty into something closer to a default. The glasses record video, capture photos, stream audio, and route queries through Meta AI, which processes images and voice commands either on-device or in the cloud. A small LED on the frames illuminates when the camera is active, which Meta has described as a privacy safeguard. The light is designed for the people around the wearer, not for the wearer themselves. It tells strangers that they are being recorded. It does not tell them that the recording may be reviewed by a human being in a different country, sitting at a desk in Nairobi, labelling what they see so that an algorithm can learn the difference between a kitchen and a bedroom, a handshake and an embrace, a document and a face.

Meta’s privacy policy for the glasses states that users who opt into sharing data for AI training purposes allow their footage to be processed by the company’s AI systems. The policy does not dwell on the human layer between the camera and the algorithm. AI training data does not label itself. Before a model can learn to interpret a scene, a person must first watch the scene and describe it. The Swedish investigation revealed what that process looks like in practice: workers in Kenya, employed by a third-party contractor, viewing the most private moments of strangers’ lives, cataloguing them, and moving on to the next clip. The footage was not anonymised before review. The workers could see faces, bodies, and personal documents. They had no way to contact the people being filmed, no mechanism to flag footage they believed had been captured without consent, and no authority to refuse the work without risking their employment.

The workers

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Sama was founded in 2008 as a social enterprise with the stated mission of providing dignified digital work to people in low-income communities. The company has operations in Kenya, Uganda, and India, and has provided data annotation services to some of the largest technology companies in the world, including Google, Microsoft, and Meta. The contract with Meta for smart glasses data annotation was one of several Sama held with the company. Workers were tasked with labelling images and video captured by the glasses to train Meta’s AI models, a process that required them to view, categorise, and describe whatever the cameras had recorded.

The Swedish investigation, published in late February 2026, reported that workers described seeing users engaged in sexual activity, using the toilet, undressing, and displaying financial information on screen. The content was not exceptional. It was the ordinary residue of a camera worn on someone’s face throughout the day, capturing whatever the wearer happened to be looking at. The workers told the journalists that the experience was distressing but that they had limited options: the work paid better than most available alternatives, and Sama’s contracts typically included non-disclosure agreements that discouraged public discussion of the content they reviewed. When the Swedish publications broke the story, they gave the workers a voice they had not previously been permitted to use.

On 16 April, less than seven weeks after the investigation was published, Sama notified 1,108 employees that their positions were being made redundant. The workers received six days’ notice. Meta’s statement attributed the termination to Sama’s failure to meet its standards, but declined to specify which standards had been breached or when the assessment was made. Sama said it was “surprised and disappointed” by Meta’s decision and that it had not been informed of any performance shortfalls prior to the termination. The timing was noted by labour advocates, regulators, and the workers themselves. Wambalo, whose organisation represents data workers across the continent, described Meta’s reasoning as a cover for retaliation: the company, he said, was enforcing “standards of secrecy” rather than standards of quality.

The pattern

This is not the first time Sama’s relationship with Meta has ended in controversy. Between 2019 and 2023, Sama employed content moderators in Nairobi who reviewed posts flagged as potentially violating Facebook’s community standards. The work required moderators to view graphic violence, sexual abuse, hate speech, and other disturbing material for hours each day, often at wages as low as $1.50 per hour. A 2022 investigation by Time magazine found that 81 per cent of 144 Sama content moderators who underwent clinical assessment were diagnosed with “severe” or “extremely severe” symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Former workers filed lawsuits in Kenya alleging that Sama and Meta had subjected them to conditions amounting to human trafficking and had interfered with their attempts to form a union. Sama later said publicly that it “regretted” taking on the content moderation work, and exited the business in 2023 to focus on what it described as less harmful data annotation services.

The smart glasses contract was supposed to be different. Data annotation, labelling images and video to train AI, is generally considered less traumatic than content moderation, which requires workers to confront the worst material humans produce. But the Swedish investigation revealed that the distinction depends entirely on what the AI is being trained to see. When the AI is attached to a camera worn on someone’s face throughout the day, the training data is their life. The workers who labelled Meta’s smart glasses footage were not reviewing content that users had chosen to upload to a platform. They were reviewing content that a camera had passively captured, often without the knowledge or meaningful consent of the people being filmed. The nature of the work had changed, but the structural dynamic had not: a Silicon Valley company outsourcing the human cost of its AI ambitions to workers in East Africa who lack the bargaining power to set the terms of their own labour.

The response

The regulatory and legal response has been swift by the standards of technology enforcement. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office wrote to Meta in early March, calling the Swedish report “concerning” and requesting information about how data captured by the glasses is processed, stored, and reviewed. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Kenya announced an investigation into whether the glasses’ data collection practices comply with Kenyan data protection law. In the United States, the Clarkson Law Firm filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of consumers, alleging that Meta engaged in false advertising by marketing the glasses as “designed for privacy, controlled by you” while routing user footage through a human review pipeline in a country with weaker data protection enforcement than the markets where the glasses are sold. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published an advisory titled “Think Twice Before Buying or Using Meta’s Ray-Bans,” warning that the glasses’ AI features allow “all parts of their life to be recorded, and then reviewed, either by the AIs or by humans behind it.”

Privacy complaints against Meta for using personal data to train AI have been mounting across the European Union, where noyb filed 11 simultaneous complaints with national data protection authorities alleging that Meta’s AI training practices violate the General Data Protection Regulation. The complaints focus on Meta’s decision to process user data under a “legitimate interest” basis rather than seeking explicit consent. The smart glasses controversy adds a physical dimension to what had been a largely digital dispute: it is one thing to train AI on posts users wrote on Facebook, and another to train it on footage of people in their bedrooms, captured by a device and reviewed by a stranger. Meta has argued that European privacy regulations are “stifling” AI innovation and that pre-emptive regulation of “theoretical harms” will prevent European businesses from benefiting from AI advances. The harms documented by the Swedish investigation are not theoretical. They are workers in Nairobi who watched strangers undress and were then told their jobs no longer existed.

The infrastructure beneath the intelligence

Meta’s AI ambitions require an enormous volume of human-labelled training data. The company is building an AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg for its employees, developing the Muse Spark model to power its platforms, and expanding the glasses’ AI capabilities to include real-time visual understanding, object identification, and conversational assistance. Each of these products depends on the same pipeline: humans look at data, describe what they see, and their descriptions become the instructions that teach the model what the world looks like. When that pipeline involves a contractor, the humans become invisible. They do not appear in Meta’s product announcements, earnings calls, or marketing materials. They appear only when something goes wrong, when a Swedish newspaper publishes an investigation, or when a contractor breach exposes the fragility of the training operation.

Mercy Mutemi, the Kenyan human rights lawyer who leads the Oversight Lab, told the BBC that the pattern of outsourcing AI’s human costs to East African workers represents a structural failure, not an aberration. “This is a very flimsy foundation to build your entire industry on,” she said. The industry she is describing is worth trillions of dollars. The foundation she is describing is a workforce paid data annotation wages in Nairobi, given six days’ notice when the contract ends, and prevented by non-disclosure agreements from telling anyone what they saw. Meta’s smart glasses are designed for privacy, controlled by the user. The question the Swedish investigation answered is which user: the person wearing the glasses, or the person in Nairobi who watched the footage and lost their job for talking about it.