Jobs was often bullied, and in the middle of seventh grade he gave his parents an ultimatum. “I insisted they put me in a different school,” he recalled. Financially this was a tough demand. His parents were barely making ends meet, but by this point there was little doubt that they would eventually bend to his will. “When they resisted, I told them I would just quit going to school if I had to go back to Crittenden. So they researched where the best schools were and scraped together every dime and bought a house for $21,000 in a nicer district.”

乔布斯经常被欺负，到七年级上到一半的时候，他给父母下达了最后通牒。“我坚持要他们送我去别的学校。”他回忆说。这在经济上对他的父母来说是个艰难的挑战。当时他们家勉强能够收支平衡。但那样的时刻，毫无疑问，父母最终一定会满足他的意愿。“他们一开始反对，我就告诉他们，如果要我回到克里滕登的话，我就再也不上学了。所以他们就调查了一下最好的学校在哪里，然后倾尽所有，在一个更好的地区，花21000美元买下了一座房子。”

The move was only three miles to the south, to a former apricot orchard in Los Altos that had been turned into a subdivision of cookie-cutter tract homes. Their house, at 2066 Crist Drive, was one story with three bedrooms and an all-important attached garage with a roll-down door facing the street. There Paul Jobs could tinker with cars and his son with electronics.

这趟搬家仅仅是向南移了3英里，来到了南洛斯阿尔托斯（SouthLosAltos）一处由杏树果园改造成的毫无特色的居民区。他们的新家位于克莱斯特路2066号，是一栋平房，有三间卧室，以及一个面朝马路、带卷帘门、设施齐全的车库。在车库里，保罗·乔布斯可以修汽车，而他儿子可以玩他的电子设备。

Its other significant attribute was that it was just over the line inside what was then the Cupertino-Sunnyvale School District, one of the safest and best in the valley. “When I moved here, these corners were still orchards,” Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house. “The guy who lived right there taught me how to be a good organic gardener and to compost. He grew everything to perfection. I never had better food in my life. That’s when I began to appreciate organic fruits and vegetables.”

这栋房子的另一个意义重大之处就是它正好处在库比蒂诺-森尼韦尔学区内，这是硅谷最安全也是最好的学区之一。“我搬来这儿时，这些角落里都还是杏树，”我们走过他家的老屋前，乔布斯指给我看。“住在那里的那个家伙教我怎么做一名有机作物园丁，以及如何制作堆肥。他不管种植什么东西都要追求完美。我一生中再没吃过比那儿更好的食物了。也就是从那时候起，我喜欢上了有机水果和蔬菜。”

Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”

尽管乔布斯的父母对于宗教信仰并不是十分狂热，但他们还是希望自己的孩子能受一点儿宗教教育，所以大多数的星期天他们都会带他去路德教堂（theLutheranChurch）。这一活动在他13岁那年鐘束了。乔布斯一家订阅了《生活》杂志，1968年该杂志在封面上刊登了一张令人震惊的照片，照片上是比亚法拉的一对饥饿的儿童。乔布斯把杂志带到教堂，质问牧师：“如果我举起我的手指头，上帝在我举之前就知道我要举哪一根吗？”

The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”

牧师回答说：“是的，上帝无所不知。”

Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?”

乔布斯于是拿出那期《生活》杂志的封面，问道：“那么，上帝知道这些吗？他知道这些孩子身上会发生什么事情吗？”

“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”

“史蒂夫，我知道你不明白，但是，是的，上帝知道这一切。”

Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”

乔布斯宣布，他再也不想崇敬这样一位上帝，他也再没有去过教堂。不过，他倒是花了好几年时间研究并尝试实践佛教禅宗的教义。几年后，他反思自己的精神感受时说，宗教应该更多地强调精神体验，而不是一味遵守教条。“当基督教太过基于信仰，而忽略了以耶稣的方式生活或者从耶稣的角度看世界时，它的精髓就消失了，”他告诉我，“我觉得不同的宗教就好比通往同一栋房子的不同的门。有时候我觉得这栋房子存在，有时候我又觉得它不存在。这是最神秘的。”

Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising. His son was fascinated by the need for perfection. “Lasers require precision alignment,” Jobs said. “The really sophisticated ones, for airborne applications or medical, had very precise features. They would tell my dad something like, ‘This is what we want, and we want it out of one piece of metal so that the coefficients of expansion are all the same.’ And he had to figure out how to do it.” Most pieces had to be made from scratch, which meant that Paul had to create custom tools and dies. His son was impressed, but he rarely went to the machine shop. “It would have been fun if he had gotten to teach me how to use a mill and lathe. But unfortunately I never went, because I was more interested in electronics.”

乔布斯的父亲当时在光谱物理公司（Spectra-Kiysics）工作，该公司坐落在旁边的圣克拉拉，为电子设备和医疗产品生产激光器件。作为一名机械师，他为工程师们设计的产品制作样机。他的儿子被那种对完美的追求所深深吸引。“激光仪器要求极其精准的调校，”乔布斯说，“真正尖端的激光仪器，比如飞机上使用的或者用于医疗的，都非常精密。工程师们会对我爸爸说，‘这就是我们想要的，我们还想要用一整块金属板一体成型来保证膨胀系数的一致’然后爸爸就要想办法怎么实现。”大多数样机都是从零开始制作的，这就意味着保罗·乔布斯必须定制各种工具和模他的儿子被此深深吸引，却很少去车间看看。“要是他能教我用铣和车床的话，一定会很有意思的，但遗憾的是，我从没去过他的车间，因为我对电子的东西更感兴趣。”

One summer Paul took Steve to Wisconsin to visit the family’s dairy farm. Rural life did not appeal to Steve, but one image stuck with him. He saw a calf being born, and he was amazed when the tiny animal struggled up within minutes and began to walk. “It was not something she had learned, but it was instead hardwired into her,” he recalled. “A human baby couldn’t do that. I found it remarkable, even though no one else did.” He put it in hardware-software terms: “It was as if something in the animal’s body and in its brain had been engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.”

一年夏天，保罗·乔布斯带着史蒂夫去威斯康星州参观他们家的奶牛场。乡村生活对史蒂夫毫无吸引力，但有一幅画面却深深刻在了他心上。他看到了一只小牛犊的出生，让他惊讶的是，这只小动物才落地几分钟就挣扎着站起来开始走路。“这不是它通过学习获得的技能，而是与生俱来的，”他回忆说，“人类的婴儿就没有这种能力。我觉得这很了不起，虽然别人都不这么想。”他用软硬件的术语来形容这个现象：“就好像是设计好的一样，动物身体里的某些东西和它大脑里的某些东西在它出生后立刻始协同作用，而不需要它去学习。”

In ninth grade Jobs went to Homestead High, which had a sprawling campus of two-story cinderblock buildings painted pink that served two thousand students. “It was designed by a famous prison architect,” Jobs recalled. “They wanted to make it indestructible.” He had developed a love of walking, and he walked the fifteen blocks to school by himself each day.

到了九年级，乔布斯去了家园髙中（HomesteadHigh）,这所学校的校园有些杂乱，由几栋两层楼的砖砌建筑构成，建筑都被刷成了粉色，当时有2000名学生。“学校是由一个著名的监狱建筑师设计的，”乔布斯回忆说，“他们想把学校建得坚不可摧。”乔布斯那时候爱上了走路，他每天都独自走过15条街去上学。