‘Think Different’ commercial – Jobs’ own narration (unaired)

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 202 recordings of Steve Jobs →

1. 1996

   Charlie Rose with John Lasseter

   Weeks before Apple bought NeXT, Jobs and John Lasseter sit with Charlie Rose to discuss Toy Story’s success and Pixar’s approach: ‘Toy Story is not about technology, it is about telling a story.’

2. 1996

   Pixar business-model interview (released by the Steve Jobs Archive, 2025)

   Published 18 Nov 2025 for Toy Story’s 30th anniversary, this unseen interview has Jobs explaining Pixar’s model of giving artists and engineers a stake in their work, lessons from Disney about focus and discipline, retention incentives, and the goal of making lasting stories.

3. 1996

   Apple/NeXT acquisition press event with Gil Amelio

   On the evening of December 20, 1996, Amelio and Jobs appeared together before Apple employees and press to announce the NeXT deal. Still photographs from the event (Apple evangelist Tim Holmes’s QuickTake shots) are well known; brief TV news excerpts exist but no complete recording was found online.

4. 1997

   Macworld Expo San Francisco (return to Apple)

   A week after Apple announced it was buying NeXT, CEO Gil Amelio brought Steve Jobs on stage during a rambling two-hour-plus keynote to talk about NeXT’s OpenStep technology as the foundation for the next Mac OS (Rhapsody).

5. 1997

   WWDC 1997 closing ‘fireside chat’ Q&A

   Still an adviser, Jobs takes unscripted questions from developers: focus means saying no, why OpenDoc was killed, ‘start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology’, NFS ‘dial tone’, licensing Mac OS to cloners, and the famous rebuttal to a heckler about OpenDoc.

6. 1997

   Macworld Expo Boston keynote (the Microsoft deal)

   A month after Gil Amelio’s ouster, Jobs announced a new board of directors and a five-point recovery plan, then the Apple-Microsoft deal: a $150 million investment, a five-year Office for Mac commitment, Internet Explorer as default browser and a patent cross-license.

7. 1997

   ‘Think Different’ commercial – Jobs’ own narration (unaired)

   Jobs recorded his own reading of ‘Here’s to the Crazy Ones’ but chose Richard Dreyfuss’s version for air because he ‘didn’t want to make it about himself’; the Jobs-narrated cut circulated after his death in 2011 and is featured in the Steve Jobs Archive.

8. 1997

   ‘Think Different’ internal presentation to Apple employees

   A week after being named interim CEO, Jobs addressed employees about refocusing the product line, cutting inventory and rebuilding the brand around its core values, then unveiled the ‘Think Different’ campaign and the ‘Crazy Ones’ spot narrated by Richard Dreyfuss.

9. 1997

   CNBC interview defending his commitment to Apple

   Jobs speaks ‘passionately’ to CNBC about returning to the company he founded, the new strategy, and why he is committed to Apple despite also running Pixar.

10. 1997

    Seybold San Francisco 1997 keynote (excerpts)

    Two weeks after being named interim CEO, Jobs addressed the Seybold publishing conference, Apple’s core professional constituency, and the surviving clips have him explaining why he ended Mac OS clone licensing and defending the August 1997 Microsoft deal.

11. 1997

    Power Macintosh G3 introduction / end of clone licensing

    Jobs’s first product launch after his return: the Power Macintosh G3 desktop and PowerBook G3, built on Motorola’s new G3 processor, which he benchmarked against Pentium II machines.

12. 1998

    Macworld Expo San Francisco 1998 (‘we’re profitable’)

    Jobs reviewed the Think Different campaign, the G3 line, the CompUSA store-within-a-store deal and Mac OS 8.1, and demoed Microsoft Office 98 and Internet Explorer 4.

13. 1998

    CompUSA quarterly employee meeting with Jim Halpin

    A short rarely seen video in which CompUSA CEO Jim Halpin interviews Jobs about Apple’s turnaround plans and the new Apple store-within-a-store sections in CompUSA locations. It documents Apple’s retail strategy before it opened its own stores.