Customer Reviews

Letters to Steve: Inside the E-mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I bought this book the same minute (literally) I heard about it. In fact, I even tweeted something along the lines of "Brilliant idea, talk about making soup from a nail". The latter part is a Swedish saying; if you don't have a lot of ingredients, you have to make do with what you got. That's the case, to a varying degree, with all books about Steve Jobs except for the Isacsson bio. Isacsson, of course, had unconditional access to Jobs and everyone else that plays a big part in his story. However, Jobs only spoke to Isacsson and every other author has to find secondary sources. That's the case here.

Still, the idea is great - which is why I bought this book. Unfortunately, the author seems to have reached his limits when he came up with the idea. The role of an author varies depending on the topic; setting; context etc much like the director of a movie. In some movies, the director can use a lot of visual effects to achieve something, but in other cases, the director should just get out of the way. The point being that in the latter case, the director should convey the story and not distract from it with unnecessary effects or intensive cutting. This author should have been the discrete director, yet tries unsuccessfully to be the visual effects lover.

This book is not only poorly written, it's also poorly researched and more times then not - offensive. People who own Mac computers are referred to as "Mac guys"; people who buy iPads are supposedly buying it solely because of Steve Jobs and not on the iPads own merits. All in all, pretty much every Apple customer are implied to be cult members, and by extension, stupid sheep. That offends me, and it's not even subtly laid out. I am fine with people disliking the Mac; Apple or even me - but I am not fine with paying to get insulted over and over again.

In essence, the author wants to profit from the death of Steve Jobs, by gathering e-mails from various websites and blogs that's available separately for free. The title is grossly misleading in that there's no insight into Steve Jobs inbox at all; it's just a bunch of e-mails that the author used copy/paste on. Like said, that could have been great in itself, but the book tries to be something else, and fails. Buy this book if you want to find some "never before seen" e-mails, or if you just like being called an idiot.

I bought this after reading Isaacson's book and this book does not disappoint. It summarizes the life of Steve in a quick but satisfying way. I think it is difficult to understand who Steve Jobs really was other than someone who shaped the world around us and this provides a different perspective. Definitely worth the read and price is right!

This book was no where as deep as the biography, but it is very much an interesting read. Well worth the $3, especially if you are a follower of Steve Jobs . . . .

I read this e-book in one sitting on a rainy afternoon in San Francisco. I didn't have much background on Apple or Steve Jobs (beyond headline news), but I found this book to be really intriguing and insightful on the man behind the company and specifically, his (slightly bizarre) email habits.

My favorite passage was when Jobs told some student that his focus wasn't about her "getting a passing grade" followed by him requesting her to "please leave us [Apple] alone." Overall, I never considered the email habits of a big-time executive, but it's a great book idea. The fact that Jobs sometimes broke news via email to an average consumer is also an interesting way to go about PR. It was also pretty crazy that a simple "yeah" or "nope" response from him would be analyzed deeply and potentially make Gawker.

This book paints an entirely different picture of Jobs - it's not too inside baseball or too focused on his past, but also not too broad. It's simply about one man's inbox - and the power of his words.

Nice work.

Well done. You always hear about the different emails that people send to steve jobs and the playful, succinct, or mysterious responses they get. It was fun to look into further into the emails with the author as he takes us deeper into the world of apple's creator.

I was excited about this when I heard about it, and the price is certainly right... but it suffers from crippling formatting issues that render the quoted emails no fun to read. Here is an example from 12% in:

"
Don't worry -
we are pulling this group back into Apple so t
hat we can invest even more sales and marke
ting resources into these products, rather tha
n dumping the products into such a small spin-
off which lacks such resources.
"

Yeah yeah... I can hear you typing already "whatever dude... you can still read it". Sure, I can still read it. But it pulls me out of the story, and bums me out. This would be a solid read that I would recommend to other Apple fans were it not for this issue. Want to fix and re-upload?

Photo of disappointing text: [...]
I'm no random Apple hater looking for any excuse to poop on anything even slightly Apple related. I took this picture with my iPhone, and I'm typing this review on my MacBook Pro. After submitting this review I'm going to go play some games on my iPad, and then prostrate myself in front of my 15 foot tall Steve Jobs shrine in my backyard. I wish my review could be better... but until these formatting issues are fixed I'll continue to let others know that this book isn't worth purchasing. Worth reading, if you can get over the issues, sure... but not worth purchasing.

Seriously disappointing. Too much commentary, not enough "Letters to Steve." Try the sample first so you can save yourself some money.

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect when I purchased this book but felt that for the $2.99 it was worth the risk. So, not only wasn't I disappointed, but I found this book to be so engaging that I read it in only a few sittings! What an interesting sneak peek into Steve Jobs's very personal-professional persona! Very cool.

"Letters to Steve - Inside the Email Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs" takes a look at Steve Jobs' life through a series of comments that he made during interviews, speaking on stage, in emails he wrote, and in correspondence exchanges that he and others engaged in.

The book covers his early career depicting such events as the Apple Lisa computer he named after his illegitimate first daughter, the successful Super Bowl commercial launch of the revolutionary Apple Macintosh, the tribulations he suffered when he was ousted from Apple in 1985 and through public statements he made, the writer of this book allows us to hear the explanations about those early days in Steve Jobs' own words. Also covered are Steve Jobs' brainchild of the NeXT computer and the email system he established with it for his new customers to communicate with him, and how Jobs made new breakthroughs with Pixar Animation Studios.

After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 email use flourished and the writer, Mark Milian, uses the exchanges in the emails he uncovered to illustrate the modern world story. Milian shows us how Steve Jobs used email to communicate with total strangers so that he could receive feedback directly from the customer as it has been widely reported globally in the news media when this e-book first published.

I found it quite remarkable to learn in this book how much Steve Jobs understood the inner workings of software, apps and how he exchanged emails with app developers about why Apple did things different from its competitors. The anecdotes Milian sprinkles throughout are delightful, such as Steve Jobs responding to a customer's email so that the customer could win a wager to use the proceeds to buy a Mac PowerBook, how Steve Jobs arranged to bring a juvenile fan who wrote him emails to attend the Apple cube store opening in New York City with him, how Steve Jobs resisted creating an early PDA that uses a stylus because he felt an electronic keyboard was better equipped to quickly type emails. Steve Jobs eventually incorporated the electronic keyboard feature into the iPhone--and later into the iPad--when he felt that he was ready to integrate the functionalities of the PDA and mobile phone into one device, according to the account in this book.

Mark Milian also gives a glimpse of the future by publishing emails from Steve Jobs describing the new iCloud, comparing the PC and Mac to old trucks that will be around for their own specific purpose but with iPhones and iPads becoming the tools we will primarily use for a long time.

Overall, the writer portrays a fair characterization of Steve Jobs and Apple product users that allow the most technical software developers to understand what drove Apple in technical initiatives that I do not totally understand but he did not relate them in such an abstract manner as to turn me off in reading about it. I understand Apple products as a user and the impact they have on the way we use technology but this book gave me a glimpse of what is driving this movement and how difficult it is for these companies, Apple included, to get it right.

In comparing the Isaacson's book with Milian's book, both gave me an insight into the man who changed our world in a big way. Isaacson explains Steve Jobs as a man and who he was. However, Milian explains Steve Jobs from a technological point of view as Milian obviously understands the technical aspects of Steve Jobs' motivations and how and why he applied them to the products and gadgets that Apple made so all us who use these products every day in our life understand the thinking that went behind to produce and market them. From reading this book it is quite apparent that Steve Jobs was aware that we never knew we needed his products until he created them and we bought them.

Steve Jobs challenged us to "Think Different." That message was loud and clear in this book.

Letters to Steve: Inside the E-mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs

I don't own a Kindle or an iPad so I downloaded the free Kindle app to my iPhone and for three bucks I downloaded the Kindle version of "Letters to Steve" to my iPhone's Kindle app and planned to read it on my daily commute to and from work. I couldn't wait. I started scrolling then began reading "Letters" on Thanksgiving Day, and I just couldn't put my device down before or after my turkey dinner. I finished reading this e-book today and have put together this review to share my thoughts and recommendation with you.

Most of the e-mails Steve Jobs sent and were published in this book are terse. However, when read in retrospective in this compilation the e-mails reveal how Apple was changing the way we live step by step with each e-mail hinting at what Apple was working on next. But Steve Jobs was not short on words when he felt he needed to make a point and he did so in lengthy e-mail threads. This e-book gives many examples of that but one that I found noteworthy deals with an exchange with a tech blogger who e-mailed Steve Jobs to belittle the iPod shortly after Steve Jobs introduced it in 2001. Steve Jobs wrote a lengthy e-mail and in the minutest detail he tried to convince the blogger of why the product was as good as we all later found out. This portable digital music device along with the paired iTunes invention changed the way we buy, store and listen to music today, and from Steve Jobs' e-mail he seemed convinced of that back then.

I got the impression that the author is an avid user of Apple products and deeply admires Steve Jobs and the company he founded but this author, Mark Milian, is a practicing journalist more so than a book author ("Letters" is his first book). As such, Milian presents the story objectively and in a way that shows Steve Jobs as a genius of a man on the one hand, while on the other depicts him as a control freak with little tolerance for mediocrity and cynicism. I think I prefer this style of writing.

The author let slip his deep esteem for Steve Jobs toward the end of the book as he relates Steve Jobs' last e-mail to the Apple community in resigning his post as CEO. The author explains Steve Jobs' illness and the ramifications from it that not much later took his life. The details of this chapter are quite a tearjerker as we learn in Steve Jobs' own words how he contemplates death and how he prepares himself, his family, his organization and all of us for that eventuality.