Highlights: Jobs' biographer on '60 Minutes'

— -- 60 Minutes's interview with Walter Isaacson, the authorized biographer of Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, aired on CBS News around the U.S. at 7 p.m. local time Sunday evening.

The segment appeared two-and-a-half weeks after Jobs's passing, and less than 24 hours before Isaacson's biography hits bookshelves. Excerpts of the biography, which contains information derived from interviews with more than 100 individuals among his acquaintance, as well as some 40 interviews with Jobs himself, have already appeared at many media outlets.

Below, we've identified some highlights from the transcript of Sunday evening's segment. You can watch the segment in full here.

Highlights

- Jobs invited Isaacson to write his biography seven years ago. Isaacson thought the request "presumptuous and premature, since Jobs was still a young man." What Isaacson didn't know at the time was that Jobs was about to undergo surgery for pancreatic cancer.

- Isaacson describes Jobs as "petulant" and "brittle." "He could be very, very mean to people at times. Whether it was to a waitress in a restaurant, or to a guy who had stayed up all night coding. … And you'd say, 'Why did you do that? Why weren't you nicer?' And he'd say, 'I really want to be with people who demand perfection. And this is who I am," recalls Isaacson.

- Isaacson attributes much of Jobs's personality and drive to a few key moments in his childhood. Isaacson tells one anecdote involving the construction of a fence with his adoptive father Paul. "And [Paul] said, 'You got to make the back of the fence that nobody will see just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect.'"

- Jobs was also influenced by the Bay Area, and not just the Hewlett-Packard offices located nearby, but also its counter-culture spirit. "He was sort of a hippie-ish rebel kid, loved listening to Dylan music, dropped acid, but also he loved electronics," Isaacson describes. He says that when Jobs worked at game-maker Atari they had to put him on the night shift because he walked around barefoot and never bathed, and so employees didn't want to work with him.

- Jobs took a seven-month leave from Atari to travel through India. His encounters there and with Zen Buddhism "really informed his design sense," says Isaacson. "That notion that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication [came from that trip]."

When Jobs returned, he began making a primitive computer for hobbyists in the garage of his parents with Steve Wozniak, Apple's other founder. They started with $1,300. By the time Jobs was 25 Apple was worth "maybe 50 million dollars," Jobs said in a taped recording with Isaacson. "I knew I never had to worry about money again."

- Jobs also had a natural disregard for authority, and felt that normal rules didn't apply to him, Isaacson explains. One manifestation of that principle was visible in a Mercedes sports coupe he owned, which he refused to put a license plate on.

Isaacson says Jobs's house in Palo Alto is completely unremarkable. "[It's] a house on a normal street with a normal sidewalk. No big winding driveway. No big security fences," Isaacson says. He recalls that Jobs said he "did not want to live that nutso lavish lifestyle that so many people do when they get rich."