Steve Jobs and attention to detail.

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Recently, I stopped and watched my three-year-old son completely captivated by Toy Story, a thirty-year-old animated film. He was singing You’ve Got a Friend in Me and asking me to play the movie again, over and over. It made me pay attention to something I had understood intuitively but had never managed to put into concrete words: the power of attention to detail.

I began noticing, observing, and trying to understand this subject better through how Apple’s products made me feel: every detail carefully polished, the perfect colors, the quality materials, an operating system made for humans, and so on…

That naturally led me to Steve Jobs. Steve is one of my heroes, without a doubt. Starting from nothing, he built Apple. After his well-documented dismissal from the very company he had founded, he failed commercially with NeXT, turned Pixar into a great success, and, after a series of improbable events, saw his company acquired by Apple. He then returned, more than a decade later, as iCEO (interim CEO) and led one of the greatest and most unlikely turnarounds in history, firmly establishing the foundations that made Apple what it is today.

Steve Jobs, in the photograph used on the cover of Becoming Steve Jobs. © Doug Menuez / Fearless Genius.

But it wasn’t Steve Jobs’s entrepreneurial nature that caught my attention most. It was a handful of habits he maintained that seemed like idiosyncrasies.

One of them, without a doubt, was this: attention to detail. Steve learned from his father to give the inside of a product the same attention as the outside. His father, Paul Jobs, was fascinated by cars and taught him to pay as much attention to the engine as to the bodywork. That planted the seed for much of what made Steve Jobs seem like a detail fanatic.

There is no shortage of stories about this. In the two books I read about him, Walter Isaacson’s biography and the excellent Becoming Steve Jobs (published in Portuguese as Como Steve Jobs Virou Steve Jobs), there are many episodes that illustrate it: the battles for fewer ports and fewer external controls on the Apple II, the perfectionism in every detail of the Macintosh, from the power cord to the box, and even the creators’ signatures inside the computer, where no one would ever see them.

Then there is the NeXT Cube, a machine so perfect in its details that it is still studied in design today and is a true museum piece.

Apple II 1977

Macintosh 1984

NeXT Cube 1988

iPhone 2007

Four products, three decades of attention to detail. Studio and publicity photographs. Credits and sources.

Even at Pixar, where Ed Catmull and John Lasseter kept Steve out of the creative side, he was obsessed with every version of Toy Story and every detail of Pixar’s headquarters. His insights and observations about the film were said to be excellent.

Larry Ellison of Oracle, a close friend of Steve Jobs, says Steve took him to watch Toy Story more than thirty times. Each version had an improvement, something different.

That brings me to a conclusion: Steve Jobs was an artist. He himself said that Apple stood at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology.

Steve didn’t do everything alone, of course. Through great effort and sacrifice, he learned to get brilliant people to work together, motivated them, and helped them produce their best work.

That is also an art. After all, what an incredible skill it is to guide people toward something as remarkable as a film like Toy Story or the iPhone.

In the end, watching my son ask to see Toy Story, wearing clothes themed around the movie even thirty years later, I know the film has passed the Lindy test and will continue to be there for my son’s children and the generations that follow.

I can’t say for certain, but I imagine that the legacy and lasting impact that attention to detail brings were what drove Jobs most. The only way to create things that are truly timeless and endure is, without a doubt, to bring that care and love to every tiny detail.

I’m certain that this was exactly what Steve was aiming for when he watched the drafts of Toy Story for the fiftieth time and spoke passionately about it to his friends. He wanted a film that, thirty years after its release, would still be watched and loved by children and adults around the world.

And that is exactly what attention to detail can make possible. Every detail matters. Every thought, every feeling you want to convey should be polished, even the things no one will ever see.

In an age when anything can be made without caring about quality, when everything is mass-produced, the people who win are those who care about the details, about creating something that will be seen, loved, and wanted in thirty, fifty, and a hundred years.

May the world have more examples like this.

References

Books:

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.
Becoming Steve Jobs, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli.

Image credits

Apple II and Macintosh: studio photographs preserved in the all about Steve Jobs.com archive.
NeXT Cube: a studio photograph preserved in the same archive.

The photographs were resized for the web. Image rights belong to their respective owners.

Why I started this blog

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0300

I want a place to keep what I’m learning and come back to it later. That’s how this blog starts.

I’ll write about software, leadership, and business, along with the things that are part of my life: fatherhood, books, running, and minimalism.

Not every post needs to be a long essay. Sometimes it’s an experience at work, a book that stayed with me, or a question I’m still trying to answer.

Writing is a way to sort through it. If any of these notes help someone else, all the better.

João Russio

Steve Jobs and attention to detail.

References

Image credits

Why I started this blog