I have been a loyal and enthusiastic Apple customer since 2002, when I bought my first iMac, the “Sunflower,” and wrote this review. I did not, however, get involved in the “cult” of Steve Jobs. I knew little about him until the media coverage of his deteriorating health made him almost impossible to ignore. I recall watching only one of his famous keynote addresses live, the announcement of the iPad in January of 2010. Around the time of his retirement in August, I, like so many others, watched his wonderful Stanford Commencement Address for the first time.
People like me — who love Apple products, who are grateful to Jobs for the indispensable role he played in creating them, but who knew little about Jobs the man — found ourselves “caught flat-footed”, as Jobs might have said, when we learned about the the seriousness of his illness, his retirement, and then his untimely death last month. We wanted to know more about this great innovator and businessman. We wanted a complete and accurate picture of the man who produced so much of value in his short life. Enter Steve Jobs, the authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson. For reasons I’ll explain, Steve Jobs’ getting Isaacson to write this biography was pure genius.
Before the book even came out, we learned that Jobs gave Isaacson hours upon hours of exclusive interviews, that he told Isaacson to feel free to interview anyone whom he wished, and that the interviewees were told to speak freely about Jobs, warts and all. In addition, Jobs said he would not ask to see the finished product before publication. All this, plus the fact that Isaacson was an experienced and respected journalist and biographer, someone picked by Jobs himself, combined to make the book a must-read, and so I pre-ordered it — on my iPad, of course.
After watching some of the pre-publication media appearances by Isaacson, I was concerned about the tone he would take in the biography. While Isaacson said he liked Jobs, some of the interviews seemed to emphasize Jobs’ least desirable and most controversial character traits. And, towards the beginning of the biography, when Isaacson used some of the value-laden terms critics have used to refer to Jobs — such as “Reality Distortion Field” — it seemed unjustified. But after reading about half the biography, I realized (1) there were some character traits of Jobs that served neither him nor anyone well, and (2) given the information he presented, Isaacson came across as both respectful and objective.
Next: The best and worst of what we learn about Jobs in the biography, and my opinion of Jobs after reading it.
I admire Jobs as much as I did before reading Isaacson’s biography. No, he was by no means perfect, and there were a number of negative things about Jobs revealed in the book. But the book also shows the reader plenty that was “insanely great” about Jobs — in terms of what Jobs accomplished and what he was like as a person — things many of us hadn’t known during all these years of benefiting from his productivity and creativity.
I recommend that you read the biography and learn for yourself about everything Jobs did and was. It is not possible to do justice, in a single blog post, to Isaacson’s comprehensive, invitingly written biography. That being said, here are some of the best and worst things the reader learns about Jobs in this book:
Best: Jobs had an excellent mind, one that was capable of seeing the big picture one minute, and then the next determining how the smallest detail fit into that picture. He favored an “integrated” over a “fragmented” approach to his work, and to at least some of his personal life. He relentlessly pursued the simplest, most elegant, and most tasteful solutions to problems of product design, function, and user interface. In his role as manager, either of teams or whole companies, he practiced the virtue of justice: He learned that his most productive, most innovative employees, the “A people” were happiest and most efficient when surrounded only by other A people, so he continually sought to weed out those he referred to as “B” and “C” people. He sought to defend and protect intellectual property rights. He wanted Apple to be worthy of customers’ trust with respect to storing their personal and financial information. He defended himself in a principled way against charges of “censorship” from those who disagreed with Apple’s policy requiring it approve all content distributed by iTunes and the iBookstore, as well as apps that could be used on Apple devices. He eschewed market research, saying, as Ayn Rand’s hero, Howard Roark, might have, that “customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He was not particularly philanthropic, and made no apologies about that. In the one instance in the book when Jobs did participate in a philanthropic project — as a favor to his friend, Bono — Jobs refused to have his company’s name depicted in a way that would minimize it. In other words, he refused to sacrifice. While he valued money — from the beginning he was pushing his partner, Steve Wozniak, to sell their creations rather than give them away — his primary motivation was not to make money. Rather, writes Isaacson, Jobs described as “the best motivator of all” the desire to create a product that he and his team would want to use and own themselves.
Worst: Besides the way Jobs initially dealt with — really, refused to deal with — the birth of his first daughter, the worst things about him might be characterized as stemming from his “Reality Distortion Field.” To be fair, much of what is ascribed to this mode of thinking seems to be no more than Jobs (1) recognizing that people often lack the self-confidence necessary to do things of which they are capable, and then (2) using whatever persuasive means at his disposal to get the naysayers to snap out of it and get the job done. However at least some of this mode of thinking seemed to be what Ayn Rand would have called a “primacy of consciousness” approach — putting an “I wish” over an “it is”.
One example of this was the amount of money Jobs spent on headquarters, as well as product manufacturing and design, while at NeXT. But this sort of thinking was most tragically evident when it came to Jobs’ dietary and, later, health care choices. In his late teens and early twenties, Jobs was said to have believed that a certain type of vegan diet would obviate the need for basic personal hygiene. And he continued to believe this, regardless of how many people told him otherwise. Decades later, after having been diagnosed with cancer, Jobs elected to use diet and other forms of alternative treatment, postponing for nine months the surgery that might have saved his life. Moreover, throughout his medical treatment, Jobs continued to practice peculiar eating habits — such as eating little more than carrots for a week — which may have hindered his health and recovery. When someone puts an “I wish” over an “it is” in a way that causes him to lose nothing but money that he can easily afford to lose, we tend not to see it as a tragedy. When we see that the same type of thinking may have caused the untimely death of the greatest producer many of us will witness in our lifetimes, someone who seemed to love his life, we are sad and frustrated. When I read about Jobs’ decision to postpone surgery on his pancreas for nine months, I thought, “If a diet could not perform as promised with respect to the mere prevention of body odor, how could Jobs have expected to cure or retard the growth of cancer by such methods?”
Next: Why Jobs wanted the biography written, and why it was his final stroke of genius.
When Isaacson asked Jobs why he arranged to have this biography written, Jobs replied:
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.”
The interesting thing was that Jobs, who usually wanted to control the minutest detail of every product that would carry the Apple name, did not exert such control over the content of this biography. Isaacson reports that Jobs, from the outset, readily acknowledged “that he would have no control over it or even the right to see it in advance. ‘It’s your book,’ he said. ‘I won’t even read it.’” The only input Jobs had, said Isaacson, was with respect to the design of the cover.
While Jobs’ approach to the biography might initially seem to be out of character for him, it made perfect sense. First, Isaacson was a professional whom Jobs had come to know over the years because of Isaacson’s work at Time magazine and elsewhere. Jobs may have viewed Isaacson, the biographer, the same way he viewed the artists with whom he worked at Pixar, and with whom he was said to have taken a more hands-off approach. Moreover, later, after Isaacson confirmed that Jobs might not like much of what was contained in the book, Jobs said that this was good because “[t]hen it won’t seem like an in-house book.” If Jobs’ goal was to cooperate with the writing of a biography that would tell his side of the story, but would also be seen as doing so objectively, a hands-off approach was essential.
When Isaacson asked Jobs why he wanted Isaacson to be the one to write his biography, Jobs replied, “I think you’re good at getting people to talk.” Writes Isaacson:
That was an unexpected answer. I knew that I would have to interview scores of people he had fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared he would not be comfortable with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out to be skittish when word trickled back to him of people that I was interviewing. But after a couple of months, he began encouraging people to talk to me, even foes and former girlfriends. Nor did he try to put anything off-limits.
A few days ago, while thinking about how smart Jobs was to have this biography written, to make sure that he had the opportunity to state his own case, I realized there was something even more brilliant about what he did in authorizing this biography to be researched and written in this way.
At various times throughout the book, we see Isaacson give Jobs the opportunity to respond to accusations made or opinions expressed. Perhaps at some point — when Jobs went from being “skittish” to “encouraging” — Jobs realized that, if he got Isaacson to interview everyone who might have anything significant to say about him, “even foes and former girlfriends,” and if, as Jobs thought, Isaacson was “good at getting people to talk,” then all of Jobs’ potential critics and detractors would be on the record, in this biography. Moreover, Jobs might be given the opportunity to answer them. The interviewees, knowing Jobs was still alive at the time of their interviews, would likely avoid saying anything that was false. And then later, after Jobs died, should they try to embellish upon or change their stories, they would appear to lack credibility. Thus Jobs was able to avoid what happened to others, like Ayn Rand, who never got to answer the charges made by her foes in posthumous biographies. So not only is Steve Jobs, the authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson, a tremendous resource for admirers, like me, who wanted to feel like they knew and understood the productive genius whom they never got a chance to meet, it was also Jobs’ final stroke of genius.
That is, unless we learn that Jobs also helped design a yet-to-be-released, insanely great Apple product.
Now I’m looking forward to reading it. And… mentioning Ayn Rand three times (and wisely well), bravo!
Thanks, Bill, I think you’ll enjoy reading it as I did.
Steve Jobs approach to “A Speaker for the Dead”
I really could care less about Jobs but I give him kudos for being a big Bob Dylan fan.
I find this cult of Steve Jobs to be both disturbing and annoying. I don’t think he would have approved of it and that is why he wanted his biography to include all the warts as well as the beauty.
I am not and never have been a Steve Jobs fan. Jobs last slam at Bill Gates was fundementally dishonest. His claim that all Gates did was copy and not innovate was the pot calling the kettle black. Jobs was as much a copyer as Gates. All successful business reach out for new technologies. He didn’t invent the graphical user interface for the PC. He bought the rights from Xerox. While most of you Apple cultists believe he invented the smartphone that honor goes to the dying Research in Motion. The last iPhone is two gernations behind the competion and all the 4S did was copy successful concepts from Android and Blackberry. Apple has yet to produce a 4G phone and is now the slowest performer in the field. The one truly innovative product that Apple creates was integrating the distribution and consuming of digital music and Jobs deserves full credit for that.
Bill Gates, mMcrosoft and Intel made the digital revolution possible. Apple has always been a fringe player. Jobs was an artist and a marketing genius. In a way his products mirror the fundamental shallowness of modern American culture. Beautiful, slick with no real substance behind it.
Maybe you should read the book. Steve definitely had a tendency to be extreme, but he was not “fundamentally dishonest” as you put it. While the Macintosh did borrow the concept of GUI from Xerox, the things the Mac team did with it were unimaginable to the Xerox engineers. While Jobs saw the future in GUI, and ran with the rough concept developed by Xerox, Gates saw the Mac and ripped it off wholesale. And if you can honestly tell me Windows 7 isn’t a OSX ripoff, you’re smoking something incredible.
RIM invented phones that sent e-mail. They were clunky, hard to use and extra features were expensive as hell. Jobs and the Apple team revolutionized everything with the touch screen concept. The iPhone was the first to make your phone a personal computer. I think the 4S was really just so they had something to release because iPhone 5 and iPad 3 aren’t ready yet. That’s why Apple didn’t release an iPod Touch 5 this year, it’s going to resemble the iPhone 5, but it’s just not ready yet. And if you look at field tests, the iPhone is just as fast or faster than the top Android phones on the market.
Without Apple’s innovation, computers would still be ugly, OS would suck, phones would still be primitive e-mailers with clunky buttons and interfaces, the music industry would be dead, and mp3 players would still be primitive and hard to navigate. Also, I doubt we would have tablet computers worth buying.
Wether you choose to acknowledge it or not, Steve Jobs was a game changer and his companies revolutionized our lives.
(1). In other words you admit that all Apple softwhere engineers did was take an existing product and make it better. Thank you for making my point. However, your assessment of Xerox’s lack of imagination is way off base. They didn’t have the product line. If they did they wouldn’t have sold the GUI to Apple.
(2) RIM devices have come along way if you haven’t noticed. Cluncky ten years ago? Yes. Clunky today? You’ve got to be kidding. This is the typical Apple marketing approach to their competitors. Hit the Strawman of what they were and reinforce that image in the market place while they ignore the current product. The latest round of Blackberry evolution is more advanced than the iPhone. You can’t argue against my claim simply based on the 4G capability alone. In this business you can’t delay your products. By the time the iPhone 5 comes out Blackberry will dead and Android and Windows phones will have gone through two more generations. The “five” will be way behind the competition when it comes out next summer.
(3) Making my point again. PCs are ugly, Macs are beautiful. I guess you aren’t intrested in functionality. Is Windows 7 a ripoff of OSX? No, all operationing systems using GUIs are the same. How about this: OS-X is ripoff of Unix and Linux. That’s a more accurate claim.
(4) Apple didn’t become relevant until the digital revolution had run to completion. Apple was dying and reinvented itself when Jobs came up with the iPod/iTunes concept. That would have been impossible with out Microsoft and Intel. The Mac died and was reborn as a PC with a different operating system and propriatary hardware. The same people who trashed IBM’s approach now drool over the Mac which is built they same way.
“How about this: OS-X is ripoff of Unix and Linux. That’s a more accurate claim.”
WOW, what a totally unserious claim. Linux -and a big lot of the open source lunacy- is a rip-off of other software, including proprietary software.
“In other words you admit that all Apple softwhere engineers did was take an existing product and make it better. Thank you for making my point. However, your assessment of Xerox’s lack of imagination is way off base. They didn’t have the product line. If they did they wouldn’t have sold the GUI to Apple.”
Wrong. Apple’s team were given a 15-minute hands-off demo of the Xerox Alto. From there, Job’s engineers had to duplicate that inspiration from scratch- and did a much better job of it. By contrast, Gates’ people outright stole Mac source-code, which had been entrusted to them for the development of Word.
> Gates’ people outright stole Mac source-code, which had been entrusted to them for the development of Word.
Microsoft didn’t need any help from Apple to develop Word. Word was developed by the folks who wrote Bravo at Xerox PARC and Word for Mac was ported from the PC version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word
Unlike most people here, I actually saw an Alto in the late 1970s. It was a combination command line/graphical interface hybrid. It had so little processor power that when it was computing, it shut down its display to save the CPU cycles used to update it until processing was done. It would have taken a massive amount of fresh user interface design work to make the Alto into a Macintosh. You could certainly say the Mac built on the research done on the Alto, but it was far from a copy.
RIM devices are still way behind Apple, to the extent that RIM is replacing its operating system and introducing all new models next year. Reviews of their current devices have been of the “nice try, still way behind” character.
There is no doubt that Apple invented an entirely new user interface paradigm with iOS. Nothing made before was anything like it. Nothing used fingers, as opposed to a stylus. The iPhone web experience was a thousand times better than older phones. Now, everyone who’s serious about building a phone builds it using a finger-based touch screen. Right now, according to reviews, RIM has by far the weakest design.
MacOS X is entirely distinct from Windows 7. It does use a Unix core, which was derived from an original licensed version of the OS, so it can’t be thought of as a copy. It actually is Unix. The Aqua compositing user interface is entirely new and was copied (rather crudely at first, then better) by Microsoft to create Windows Vista and 7.
It is certainly true that operating system developers steal ideas from each other all the time. But Apple has pulled far more than its weight in the innovation stakes.
D
David:
I think you would agree that all developers, begged, borrowed, bought and stole from each other over years to the benefit of all of us.
The principle Measure of Effectiveness for a smart device is how well it moves and processes data not how slick it looks or its “1 million” color screen or how many Apps it has. (Apps are a gimmick used by all smartphone developers to seperate you from your money) By this measure he iPhone has not been competitive since 2010 when 4G Android devices became available. Every “innovation” on the iPhone 4S was available On Android, RIM or Microsoft devices last year. Go take your iPhone down to a Verizon store and do a direct comparision of your iPhone with the latest generation of Android devices. You will be wishing that your contract was up so you could a more advanced phonw.
The one truly innovative product that Apple creates was integrating the distribution and consuming of digital music and Jobs deserves full credit for that.
To the credit of Steve Jobs, he did not reject out of hand the suggestion of Paul Vidich, then an executive at Time Warner, that Apple sell digital music at 99 cents a song.
I really appreciate your comment. What I know about Steve Jobs, I’ve learned in the last month! But what you said about what he actually invented resonated with me because in comparing him to Edison, critics are more accurate than they know. Edison worked his inventors like slaves, and burned out his competitors or had them beaten up by thugs, just as his pal Rockefeller did at Standard Oil, (both good old Ohio boys) and worst of all, he used their ideas and claimed them all as his own. He was born about 20 minutes from where I grew up, so I’ve picked up a few things about him here and there. I find it so frustrating that villains often become heroes and vice versa in subjective histories. Not that Mr. Jobs is a villain…far from it. I really respect the fact that he wanted the truth about himself to come out. Had Edison done that, we wouldn’t be extolling him so much about his ‘genius’ but at least there’s no cults about him.
Thanks for this thoughtful article. Another term used by Ayn Rand would have been applicable: compartmentalization. If only he applied the same reality orientation he did to his health as he did to Apple.
Thanks, Chip, agreed.
Everybody is ignorant, just in different subjects.
Mr. jobs was very smart man with computers, but he was not when it came to medicine and the the Lord Jesus. He lost his life and then soul . The bible says if u gain the whole world and lose your own soul what does it gain u ?
In response to your accusations regarding Christ, this comes directly from the biography:
“Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’ 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 finer, will God know which one I’m going to raise before I do it?”
The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”
Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?”
“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”
Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshiping such a God, and he never went back to church.”
So in other words, he couldn’t fathom the lack of reason applied by God in letting those children starve and decided that he wanted nothing to do with him.
(Excerpt from Steve Jobs)
All these comments about how Jobs did not invent this or that and that Xerox did it are pretty much like the old joke where the Greek claims they invented sex to which the Italian agrees but retorts that it was the Italians who introduced it to women.
If Jobs wanted his kids to know and understand him, he ought to have spent his last days with them, not a biographer.
Thank you for this review, Amy, particularly since I’m in the midst of enjoying the Jobs biography. I’m up to the point where Jobs is developing the MacIntosh and competing with others in his company who are working on the Lisa. When I’m done I’d like to write a review, too.
As an aside to the discussion going on here and elsewhere about Jobs, including articles in the New York Times, I find it curious how critics of Jobs call the people who admire him and his products “cultists,” or who write that they treat him as if he’s a “God,” etc. (Hmm, as an Objectivist, I wonder where I’ve come across that kind of talk before.) Where does this use of derogatory religious terms come from? Those who use it seem to want to believe that Jobs’ admirers think he did no wrong, or that he was some kind of grand innovator. That might be true of some Apple fans, as is true of some people who admire any prominent figure. I don’t imagine that is prevalent.
I simply see that Jobs’/Apple fans have a great appreciation for his great work, original or not, and some, like me, regard him as a moral giant for all his great products, for making billions from them, and, along the way, elevating the lives of Apple users. (I’m writing this comment on a MacBookPro, and can say that it has improved my life greatly since I started using it last year.) I think the “cult” and “God” pejoratives come from those who just fundamentally cannot tolerate hero-worship.