These normal encounters with someone who, to repeat Catmull’s pithy phrase, “veered so far from the mean,” were memorable enough that dozens of people, after Steve’s death, wrote about such meetings on Quora, an online query site popular with Silicon Valley types. A designer named Tim Smith described the time his old Sunbeam Alpine sports car stalled in front of the Jobs driveway. Laurene came out and brought him a beer while he tried to figure out what to do, and then she offered to call a friend of theirs who knew a lot about Sunbeams. When the friend came by—dressed in a tuxedo for a night out—Steve emerged from the house with Reed. Steve got in the car and tried to crank it while his friend worked under the hood trying to get the thing going, but nothing worked. As Smith writes online: “I have to stop here—it’s a Kodak moment—something you want to remember. It’s a beautiful Fall evening in Palo Alto. Your car’s broken. A formally dressed close friend of Steve Jobs is under the hood working on your engine. You are talking with Steve’s absolutely lovely and down-to-earth wife. Steve is in the car, with his kid, trying to crank it. You don’t often get close to people like Jobs, much less in a ridiculous situation like this, where you realize that they are just really good people. They’re normal, funny, charitable, real people. Not the people the press talks about. Steve is not the maniacal business and design despot the media loves to portray—well he is, but not always.”

This was a side of Steve’s life that was seldom seen, and he made no attempt to publicize it. The general myth of Steve as a brilliant and driven egotist, who would sacrifice or shove aside anything or anyone for his career, carried the unfortunate corollary that he must have been a bad father and friend, and a man incapable of caring and love. It was a stereotype that never came close to gibing with my own experience of him.

Contrary to that caricature, and unlike most other CEOs I had interviewed at Fortune and the Wall Street Journal, Steve always seemed human and spontaneous with a penchant for honesty that stung and yet rung. True, some of this could turn negative: he could be scathing when he disagreed with something Fortune had published, and more than once I heard him sneer condescendingly at certain colleagues of mine with unreserved arrogance. But he could also be goofy: Once, when he was telling me that a new software interface was “good enough to lick,” he actually leaned forward and licked the screen of the 27-inch cinema-display monitor in front of a whole room full of engineers. And he could be deeply funny in the most disarming ways: One time I came to interview him wearing a loud silk shirt with wavy vertical navy blue stripes separating rows of dozens of large, blossomy, bloodred figures, each about three inches across. Those splotches really leaped from that shirt. When I walked into the conference room, Steve looked me up and down and quipped, “Did you have a meeting with a firing squad before you came to see me?” He paused for effect and then cackled. He would cut loose with a good belly laugh when he was truly amused; according to Laurene, she heard it most when he was cracking wise with the kids around the house.

It isn’t that I looked at Steve and saw a model father. I knew how hard he worked, and that his relentless drive carried a personal cost. But I had been given a look inside his home life over the years, and it seemed every bit as authentic as that of my own friends and colleagues. These stories on Quora, and the moments I experienced with him around Palo Alto or at his house, are mundane. But as time went on I came to realize that this was exactly the point: he craved a certain normalcy in his life, and he was able to get that most at home. With his family. They provided a therapeutic—and very human—outlet that he needed, especially in contrast to Apple, where he was gearing up to dive head-first into an uncertain future.

IF IMOVIE HAD been a sort of exploratory mission into the world of digital applications for consumers, iTunes would prove to be the expedition itself. Armed with a leadership team he trusted more and more, his keen aesthetic sensibility, a belief that the intersection of the arts and technology could lead to amazing things, and the growing understanding that great ideas develop in fits and starts, Steve was ready to see what Apple could bring to the world of music. In hindsight, of course, this seems like such an obvious course of action. But as in all of the most challenging and eventually rewarding journeys, there was little certainty at the outset of where they would end up. Steve would just have to follow his nose.

He had always loved music, but like many people in their forties, the playlist he returned to was pretty well established. Steve and I talked about the Beatles and Dylan, and sometimes one or the other of us would carp about something new we didn’t like so much. You can come to seem like an old fogey pretty fast when it comes to music, and in this way Steve was no different from anyone else.

This might help explain why Steve did not react earlier to the explosion, in the late 1990s, of digital sound formats for storing and playing music on a personal computer. During that period, several startup companies started dabbling with “jukebox” applications to manage MP3s—the shorthand term for digital files that contained, in compressed form, recorded music that had been “ripped” (in other words, copied) from an audio CD onto a PC’s hard disk. Others developed their own encrypted compression algorithms in hopes of convincing the recording industry to adopt their technology and build a new business model for music to be sold directly to consumers online. Two, in fact, had been started or financed by Microsoft alumni—RealNetworks and Liquid Audio.

Then there was Napster, the brainchild of a Massachusetts teenager named Shawn Fanning. Napster was the software application that really blew the lid off things. In the summer of 1999, Fanning concocted a “peer-to-peer” file-sharing service that allowed individuals around the world—conceivably anyone with a computer and an Internet connection—to upload and download MP3s, creating a way for people to share their own music collections with one another. Since the files were in digital form, the free copies were practically indistinguishable from the originals. It was one of the first truly “viral” Internet applications, a genuine killer app, that attracted tens of millions of users within months. It also was illegal. Napster facilitated the widespread piracy of recorded music, triggering a wholesale behavioral shift among music consumers that would eventually all but wreck the recording industry’s traditional business model. The courts would shut down Napster in 2001, but not before it had become a cultural sensation, and Shawn Fanning a celebrity worthy of the cover of Time magazine.

All this had gotten rolling while Steve had been busy stabilizing Apple. He had been preoccupied attacking problems that were directly in front of him: rationalizing inventory, stabilizing cash flow, trimming head count, assembling a new management team, and reviving advertising and marketing, not to mention supervising the design of new products. Steve’s intense focus had been on Apple’s internal needs and issues. Music hovered on the periphery of his narrowed field of vision. But now he realized that Apple had to move into music, and fast.

The story of Apple’s move into digital music is the tale of a man, and a team, learning how to adapt over and over again on the fly. Steve had solidified the company by narrowing its product lines so that Apple could once again produce distinctive computers. He had reaffirmed the company’s mission, for employees and for customers, with ingenious marketing and respectable financial results. But Apple’s product portfolio was still built around computers. Now that Steve was beginning to sense that the merger of consumer electronics and computers was emerging as a critical growth market, Apple’s metabolism, and many of Steve’s old habits, would have to shift. Starting with the creation of iTunes, Apple had to become a far more nimble company than it had ever been in the past. Steve had displayed a newfound openness by agreeing that the company had to move quickly past iMovie and into digital music. Now he’d have to maintain that same willingness to be flexible, and to follow his nose, wherever it led.