The Interview and Its Occasion
David Sheff conducted the interview in late 1984, when Jobs was twenty-nine years old and the Macintosh had just launched. Playboy published it in its February 1985 issue under the title "Steven Jobs." At the time, Jobs held the title of chairman of Apple’s board and was overseeing the Macintosh division; John Sculley had been president and CEO since 1983. The conversation ran at unusual length — several hours of recorded material condensed into one of the longer Q&A features Playboy ran ↗ in that period. It is a primary source in the strictest sense: a transcript-based record of what Jobs said, on the record, to a named journalist, in a named publication with a specific cover date.
The interview covers computing philosophy, Apple’s competition with IBM, the meaning of the personal computer, and Jobs’s views on creativity, youth, and technology. Because of its timing — Macintosh had just shipped; the internal conflict with Sculley that would cost Jobs his operational role by May 1985 had not yet become public — it captures Jobs at a particular and unrepeatable moment.
The Passages Most Often Extracted
Two passages from the Sheff interview circulate widely online, sometimes with attribution, sometimes without; a third line sometimes placed alongside them does not come from the interview at all.
The first is the computer-as-bicycle passage. Jobs described the personal computer as "the most remarkable tool we’ve ever built" and returned to a comparison he had used in other contexts: that a human with a bicycle outpaced every other animal in locomotion efficiency, and that the computer was "a bicycle for our minds." The bicycle metaphor appears in other Jobs interviews from this period, but the Playboy version is one of the most fully developed statements of it and is the version most often quoted.
- Interview conducted — late 1984; publication date — Playboy, February 1985
- Jobs’s age at time of interview — 29
- His title at the time — chairman, Apple board; head of Macintosh division
- Sculley had been CEO since 1983; the public break came May 1985
The second is his remark on death and motivation. Jobs told Sheff that the prospect of dying was a useful spur, since it forced a person to decide what really mattered. In a longer passage he connected urgency with awareness of mortality — the idea that time is finite sharpens what matters. That passage is sometimes conflated with similar remarks he made in the 2005 Stanford commencement address, which postdates it by twenty years. Readers checking a quotation should confirm which occasion it came from before citing either.
The third is his characterization of great work as the product of people who love what they do. "The only way to do great work is to love what you do" circulates enormously online — but it comes from the 2005 Stanford commencement address, not the Playboy interview, and a secondary account such as Walter Isaacson’s biographyshould not be taken as its source. Anyone citing this line needs the specific source in hand, not a secondary account of it.
Two passages from the Sheff interview circulate widely online, sometimes with attribution, sometimes without; a third line sometimes placed alongside them does not come from the interview at all.
How to Use It Correctly
The full text of the February 1985 Playboy interview ↗ has been reproduced in several online archives; verifying a passage means finding the Q&A exchange in the original text, not a pull-quote on a quotation aggregator site. Context matters: Jobs was speaking within a structured interviewer-subject format, and many of the most-quoted remarks are answers to specific questions that change their meaning when the question is removed.
The interview is not free of editorializing — Sheff’s questions sometimes lead, and Jobs occasionally pivots away from the literal question. A careful reader notes where Jobs is responding directly and where he is redirecting. That said, the Sheff interview remains what serious researchers treat it as: a dense, reliable record of Jobs’s thinking at one of the pivotal moments in Apple’s history, conducted by a skilled interviewer and published in a mainstream magazine with editorial standards. Compared to the posthumous sources — the Isaacson biography, the assembled quote pages — it is as close to the ground as the documented record gets.
- "Bicycle for our minds" — appears here and in other interviews; Playboy version is among the most fully stated
- Mortality/urgency passage — often conflated with 2005 Stanford address; different occasion
- "Only way to do great work" — from the 2005 Stanford address, not the Playboy interview; source-check required before citing