Story from 'the wife' seems a bit stretched - especially the part about next morning flight.. but all in all it wouldn't be surprising if there was some truth to it because Jobs was obsessed with Sony since 80s and tried to, basically, build Sony 2. This is well documented and probably the most visible part of it was his turtleneck attire which was modeled after what he saw at Sony (they wore uniforms).
The creative director of Apple's ad agency tells a story that illustrates Jobs's Sony obsession well [1].
In 1998, when Steve Jobs was back as interim CEO at Apple and had a cool new consumer computer nearing completion, he wanted to call it "MacMan", along the lines of Walkman. It was changed to "iMac" at the last minute.
We nearly ended up with PhoneMan 5s running ManOS 7...!
