Customer Reviews

Steve Jobs

5 star:		(685)
4 star:		(239)
3 star:		(91)
2 star:		(66)
1 star:		(55)

 

 

This is a gripping journey into the life of an amazing individual. Despite its girth of nearly 600 pages, the book zips along at a torrid pace.

The interviews with Jobs are fascinating and revealing. We get a real sense for what it must have been like to be Steve, or to work with him. That earns the book five stars despite its flaws, in that it's definitely a must-read if you have any interest at all in the subject.

But there are places in the book where I have to say, "Huh?"

The book is written essentially as a series of stories about Steve. The book continuously held my interest, but some of the dramas of his life seem muted. For instance, he came close to going bust when both Next and Pixar were flailing. There was only the slightest hint that anything dramatic happened in those years. In one paragraph, Pixar is shown as nearly running him out of money. A few brief paragraphs later, Toy Story gets released and Jobs' finances are saved for good.

We hear a lot about Tony Fadell's role in the development of iPhone. Tony led the iPod group and was clearly a major source for the book. You may know from a recent Businessweek article that Tony was basically driven out of the company shortly after the final introduction of iPhone, due to personality conflicts between him and Scott Forestall, the person now in charge of iOS development. But the book doesn't say a word about it. Tony simply disappears from the rest of the book with no explanation, and Forestall is barely mentioned.

Another strange incident was the Jackling house, the house he spent a large part of his life in. A case could be made that the house is historic simply because Steve spent many of his formative years living in it. Preservationists were battling with him to save the house. Only a couple of months before his death, when he must have known he was not going to actually build a house to replace it, he had the house torn down. I would have loved to learn this story. Why did he buy it? Why did he destroy it through neglect? Why did he acquire such a blind loathing for it that he worked hard to get it torn down?

And why did Jobs keep almost all the Pixar options to himself? He doesn't seem to have needed the money, or even really wanted it that much. He could have cut his friends John Lasseter et al into their own huge fortunes. Lasseter only got about $25 million from Pixar, which seems like a shockingly low amount in view of his contributions. Now, it's not like they will starve or anything, and I think John can buy pretty much anything he wants, but it still seems surprising Jobs is so ungenerous.

There were a lot of things like this, incidents casually tossed away in a brief paragraph that should have merited an entire chapter.

I think this will always be the best account of the emotional aspects of Steve's life, which are fully covered. The chapters about his illness moved me to tears. But as an account of what really happened at Apple and how Steve fixed the company, it's insufficient. I guess that will have to await more distance from the subject.

Of course what's truly remarkable about Jobs is that he lived a life so full of incident that perhaps no biography has the space to cover the broad sweep of his life. He accomplished as much as 10 ordinarily famous men. Maybe the upshot is that you just can't fit a man like this in a book, even if that book's nearly 600 pages.

Steve Jobs wanted to change the world, "put a dent in the universe." And he did. If you are interested in life and want to know how Jobs changed it right before our eyes, you should read this book.

No other book on Jobs has been based on first hand information from the Master himself, his colleagues and his detractors. There is no other way to know the man who changed the way we live and work. The fact that the book is engaging is a big bonus.

First Jobs' personal life, personality and beliefs. Like all fascinating people in history, Jobs was a bundle of contradictions. Born out of wedlock, he was an American icon and yet born of a Syrian Muslim whom he never knew, but had accidentally met. Adopted at birth by working class parents, he became skeptical of the Church as the all-knowing god did not help the starving children in Biafra and alternated between being a believer and a non-believer. He was, at different times, a vegan and a fruitarian (hence the name Apple). Jobs was influenced by the counter cultural ideas of the 60's and the 70's and yet become one of the most revered corporate figures of all time. He was a multi-billionaire who lived on a regular street with no high fenced compound, security or live-in servants; a Zen Buddhist who was obsessed with Zen-like simplicity but did not possess Zen-like tranquility; a son who tried to abandon his child like the way he had thought he was abandoned; a leader who was highly demanding of his colleagues and coworkers; a vastly influential figure in computing who neither built computers not wrote codes himself; a genius who was mean to many people. All these factoids had to have some influence on who he was and who he became and may keep interested psychologists busy for years. Yet, it is not for these tabloid fodder that he is looked upon with awe. To get caught up in the contradictions of a man is to miss the man.

So who is the man then? Isaacson presents Jobs life and work as a play in three acts.

During the first act, two unlikely partners named Steves (Jobs and Woz) create the world's first commercially viable personal computer, Apple II. Jobs then creates the revolutionary but unsuccessful Lisa. Apple goes public, Jobs creates the Mac, which carves itself a distinct niche. He then brings in Pepsi's Scully to manage the company only to find himself ousted from the company he founded. During his exile Jobs creates another revolutionary but not-so-successful computer NeXT. But Jobs other venture, Pixar, an outstanding animation company, is a huge commercial success.

The second act is Jobs' return to Apple. Apple was in decline and it buys the money losing NeXT. Job returns to the company he founded as the interim CEO. Introduces a series of products: peppermint colored iMacs followed b y 21st Century Macs.

The third act is the post-pc revolution, the most dramatic of all: the creation of ipod (almost 10 years ago to the day), paradigm-changing iphone and the category-creating ipad, along with many other things and cloud computing. We can't imagine a world today without ipads, ipods and iphones. The rewards are high. Apple first surpasses Microsoft and becomes the most valuable tech company. Then Apple becomes, for brief periods of time, the most valuable company in the world.

But this is not the story of Apple, but of Job. What was happening in the background while the three act play is being staged - to his family, his health, his odd beliefs that might have cost him his life, and his relationships with other giants of technology - is the focus of this book. The story is told with many interesting anecdotes such as Bill Gates incredulously exclaiming "Do ALL of you live here?" when visiting for the first time Steve Jobs' modest house.

This is an "authorized biography" and I'm wary of "authorized" biographies. Always thought they were full-length PR pieces. This one is different. Jobs gave Isaacson complete freedom to write the book and Jobs didn't demand editorial control. He didn't even want to see the book before it was published. And it shows. You see Jobs as he was. Warts and all. This is Jobs' last gift to those of us who admired his vision of the world, but wondered about the essence of the man behind it all. Now we know.

As you finish reading Job's biography of nearly 600 pages, something strikes you as odd. Steve Jobs' death is not mentioned in the book. Not the date, not the time and not even the fact that he is no more. Strangely fascinating. Like the man himself.

INTRODUCTION

Apple has always meant more to me than as a computer company, because of my early experiences in the late 1970's and early 1980's from age 8 using the Apple ][, //e, and later the Mac. They represented amazing products that I could understand even as a child, that this was the direction of the future. It was odd to me then, that the world was still embracing the MS-DOS command line interface and the IBM PC/AT machines. When in the late 1990's, Apple neared bankruptcy, with Microsoft Windows dominating the market, it taught me as a young man that companies that try to make the very best can be under appreciated by the masses, just as the adults near me in the 1980's could not see the amazing nature of my Apple //e and Mac back then. Good guys, it seemed, do finish last. It was disheartening.

Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, the world now knows of his genius and brilliance.

This biography is utterly amazing. I could not stop reading the entire biography and finished in less than 2 days.

WHAT I LIKED

1. Extraordinarily comprehensive - The book covers an immense number of different "phases" of his life from his famous adoption story to the start of Apple Computer, to NeXt, Pixar, love life, development of his iconic products, to the time before his death (although his death is actually never mentioned).

2. Ruthlessly objective - As a fan of Steve Jobs, I cringed at all the negative descriptions of Jobs's conduct with strangers, his management team, other CEO's, etc. I knew of his candor and lack of sensitivity towards others, but the degree to which this is depicted made me cringe and even wonder if Jobs should not be garnering so much world-wide respect. This sentiment was strong in the beginning of the biography, but by the end of the biography, I had actually become accustomed to Jobs's personality through the biography, almost as if I had personally known the man and adapted to him. The biography actually made me feel like I knew him.

3. Extraordinary historical perspective - Even if this biography were not to mention Steve Jobs, it would be fascinating. There is so much written about the history of Silicon Valley, other famous CEOs, musicians, artists, politicians, etc, that the book is enticing.

4. Extraordinary perspective on other famous leaders - Jobs spoke candidly about his opinions regarding virtually every important person that may have crossed his path. There are comments and stories regarding John Sculley, President Clinton, Obama, Bill Gates, Jeffrey Katzenberg (Disney), Michael Eisner (Disney), Bob Iger (Disney), Bono, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono, Steve Wozniak, Larry Ellison (Oracle), Eric Schmidt (Google), Larry Page (Google), Andy Grove (Intel), etc.

5. Extremely detailed descriptions of Jobs's business decision-making processes - This is true throughout the biography, but especially so towards the last third, where there is an extraordinarily detailed account by Jobs of his thought process during development of the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and iCloud. In this latter third of the biography, whatever doubt may have existed of whether or not Jobs should be so revered is laid to rest when we witness his amazing decision-making ability.

6. Unexpectedly funny - Especially in the very beginning of the biography, you can't help but laugh when you read about John Sculley's first day at Apple and seeing Jobs sitting on a desk playing with his bare toes.

7. Jobs's personal life - This has always been an enigma and the most many knew of Jobs's personal life came from his 2005 Stanford commencement speech. We see into his early girlfriends' perspectives of Jobs, his current wife and children's perspective. The fascinating story of his biological parents, biological sister, daughter for whom he initially denied custody, three children and wife. There is much written about his perspective on Zen Buddhism and his trek to India.

8. Extremely detailed - For all the above points, there was an immense amount of detail that I never envisioned would exist in this biography.

9. Easy to read - The author makes reading each sentence effortless.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

1. Not enough photos - The few photos that were included were great, but it left you wanting more.

2. Possibly too much of the negative aspects of Jobs's personality were described - No doubt that the man could belittle others, but there was so much emphasis of this especially in the beginning of the bio, that I wondered if the author didn't try too hard to make this point for fear of being accused of being too soft in his description of Jobs

3. Some very slight repetition in the very beginning of the biography from passages found in the middle and end of the biography.

4. I wished for more of Steve Jobs's perspective - Every now and then, the author would mention what Jobs thought of a certain past event but I wish there were more of those. So much of the biography read more like a history book trying to be objective and accurate, but I really wanted to know what Jobs thought about everything. I wanted his perspective more, even if it would make the book less objective.

CONCLUSION

This biography is amazing because of the subject matter, but it is also well-written. It seemed to be such an effort at objectiveness, however, that it actually lacked what I wanted to read most, which was Jobs's perspective. I appreciated the author's efforts and painting an accurate historical picture, but I really wanted to know what was on Jobs's mind regarding everything that was written about him. There was not enough of that, which is unfortunate, because it is in my opinion, his perspective that mattered the most.

This new, highly-anticipated bio is reasonably comprehensive in scope, but written in a plodding, subjectively fawning fashion that undercuts its impact. Mr. Isaacson doesn't hail from the technology world, and it shows; his feel for the real importance of Jobs' accomplishments is largely constrained to social impact (of the fuzzy, gee-whiz sort) rather than crucial areas of interface, functionality and convergence. Why do Apple's products really work? What impact will they have on how we interact with the digital world, tomorrow and after? Isaacson has no idea. All he seems to know is that 'simplicity' is good, and that 'design' is more than skin deep. And that the little things matter. Millions upon millions of people already know that; the opportunity missed here is to go deep on the subject, and unpack it. That doesn't happen here, because the writer is out of his element.

Apart from that, we learn that Jobs was basically an ass, and that he cried a lot when he didn't get his way. It's implied that he carried a narcissistic disorder, but that's never really explored -- to the book's detriment, as psychiatric context is pretty important to understand how a comprehensive tyrant could achieve so much, and improve the productivity and satisfaction of so many.

The book is also overlong -- a remarkable thing given the richness of the subject. It's written almost as a sequential fact-finding report, rather than as a truly insightful look at a man and his work. We come away with the impression that strong-willed CEOs can do what they want, as long as they make money for shareholders and impart a sense of accomplishment (however painfully won) to their underlings. Not exactly a revelation, but it takes more than 600 pages for Isaacson to drive the point home.

I'm glad we have this bio, but I suspect someone will come along and write a much better treatment of Jobs' life. For now, don't expect to learn any larger truths about Jobs and his world; just enjoy the anecdotes, and prepare to make your own conclusions about the book's fascinating subject.

I finished reading it two short days after it was first available.

My wide eyed teen self loved the original Apple II.

31 years later and a day before his death, in a heaving Apple Store of his design, I walked out with a Macbook. How can this man be gone? How did he do it? Read the book.

Unfortunately I believe the editing may have been rushed. To take one trivial but annoying example the word lapidary is used twice in short succession (describing the skills of both Jobs and Gates). More than one event is re-told to the reader. Overall, I found the writing style dull, it lacked the fireworks of the subject. Luckily Jobs is on every page, making things interesting.

The book at first seems long but not when you subtract the large index, and other supporting pages. This isn't any problem except there are giant holes left for future biographers. An example: AT&T is not even mentioned in the text! There are is nothing written on how Jobs convinced The Phone Company to cede so much control to the iphone. I feel like Jobs revealed a lot of his early life but the last 10 years, the most productive and interesting ones, were mainly and sketchily told through the eyes of others. At one point it is revealed that Apple has 70,000 workers in China and 15,000 engineer managers (a figure not even available to hire in the USA). I'm sure Jobs was all over this, yet there is no further exploration.

In retrospect I found the constant repetition of the Jobs reality distortion zone, and his habit of being cruel, well ... repetitive! By his third cruel action honestly all that can be said about unkind Steve had been said. Subsequent speculations on his personal motivations and so on never added anything new.

One thought on the legacy of Jobs: Isaacson concludes that despite his flaws, he deserves to be alongside greats in the industrialist hall of fame and you'd have to be a mean spirited or jealous person to disagree with that assessment. Yet I wonder if the greats of yesterday would survive their life, and particular personal flaws, examined and documented in such detail. I'm still in awe of what Jobs did with his life, he more than lived up to his own marketing.

PS: It is a shame that the book does not come with links to youtube videos and other supporting information. For many of the key events and people in the book if you search you can find the original material (videos etc) that are so much more than the paragraph that describes them.

I stopped frequently and switched to a browser.

What a shame the e-book about such an amazing (and tech oriented) life, describing the pursuit of perfection, could not include even one link.

Walter Isaacson is one of my favorite biographers. His books about Einstein, Kissinger, and Benjamin Franklin are fantastic. So last summer when I heard that he would be writing a book titled Steve Jobs, I immediately put it into my Amazon cart.

Little did I realize that Jobs would be gone by the time the book was released. A sad loss for his family, for Apple, and for those of us who love the unique Silicon Valley area and culture. Jobs changed the world with his innovation and passion. He brought together great design and great technology as nobody else has ever done.

I never met Steve Jobs but we had many overlapping areas in our lives. We were close in age, we both grew up in Silicon Valley, and we had a few mutual acquaintances. I remember driving past the Next building every day to and from work in the 1980's. On the day Jobs died it struck me that for my entire life, with the exception of our college years, he and I lived within about 30-miles of each other. Every location mentioned in the biography is familiar to me because of that.

From the book I learned that we had one other significant connection: Steve's father was a frequent wrecking yard scavenger who took Steve to the junkyards on weekends. Good chance that Steve's father and my father met; a more distant chance that Steve and I crossed paths as kids. Either way, I guess I can say we sold products to Jobs before he sold anything to us!

One of the great things about this biography is that it doesn't pull any punches. Steve Jobs was a testy character, hard to work with, and moody. He was definitely from the countercultural world of the 1960's, experimenting with LSD, Eastern religions, and communal farms. That might be forgiven because of his youth and the era, but he was distant from his best friends, harsh to people who loved him, and neglectful of his children. Shoot, he even parked in the handicap space at the Apple headquarters. The book brings all of this up. I often wondered how his behavior was overlooked by those who revered him.

One of the best parts of the book is the first half about Jobs' childhood and youth. It emphasizes his being adopted, and later shares the story of him rediscovering his family. It sets the stage for the person Jobs became. The theme of abandonment and "me against the world" was prevalent throughout.

In the second half the book has a tendency to become a profile of Apple's greatest hits. The decade of the 2000's saw the redesign of the Macintosh computers, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, MobileMe, iCloud, etc etc. Where Isaacson loses me is when he delves into an explanation of all of that. I realize it's relevant to the story of Steve Jobs, but it's recent history that is well documented.

This weakness is forgotten when you read the end of the biography. Isaacson develops the storyline of how Jobs changes in the later part of his life. His losing battle to cancer is described with gracious transparency. An insightful (and somehow sad) part of the book is when we read that Steve's personality changed as he realized his life would be cut short. Excellent writing from Isaacson.

On a more significant note, a strength of the book is the excellent way that Isaacson explains how Jobs lived at the intersection of science and the liberal arts. Or as it is sometimes put, at the place where technology meets the humanities. Jobs himself fully understood this and was proud of it, as could be seen from his famous commencement address at Stanford a few years back.

A wonderful book about a fascinating person. And even with a few slow parts, this may be my favorite book of the year.

I don't read many biographies. The previous one I had read was "Mark Twain: A Life" by Ron Powers. But when I finished that book, I felt that I knew Sam Clemens as a person. In contrast, when I finished Isaacson's biography, I didn't feel like I knew Steve Jobs much better than when I started.

Isaacson did an admirable job covering the events of Jobs' life and he provided many interesting anecdotes thanks to his access to the people who knew Jobs, but the access was wasted on Isaacson. I hope that someday someone writes a biography insightful enough to capture this complex person, but it's likely that that author won't have the opportunity to conduct as much original research because he or she will not have been anointed as Jobs' official biographer.

This book reads like an extended magazine article. Rather than capture the essence of Steve Jobs, Isaacson stops at describing his abusive behavior, crying, etc. When I finished, I was left hungry for a deeper analysis of both Steve Jobs and the products he created.

Don't buy into the hype about this book. This bio is an overrated, mediocre work, and it's such a shame. Instead of giving us a rich, nuanced insight to Steve Jobs we're handed basically the Labors of Steve Jobs. Like a checklist, Issacson, hits the major beats and peppers it with some quotes before moving on to the next thing in line. It reads more like a collection of articles than an exclusive official biography. It's the bare minimum I'd expect out of a biography. But to give such a meager offering with unrivaled and exclusive interview access to the person is disappointing at best.

Issacson overemphasizes two things over and over in the book. His adoption (phrased often as abandonment) and the impact it had on Jobs' personality, and the often mentioned "reality distortion field". I always thought it was writing 101 to not reuse the same term over and over again. But damn if Issacson didn't run it into the ground. The guy should've trademarked the term as much as he used it. I imagine you could make quite the drinking game out of listening to the audio book. Issacson doesn't even discuss the origin of the term until he's mentioned it a couple dozen times.

Issacson goes through the book oscillating between Jobs portrayed with sociopathic tendencies, and being a demigod capable of making the impossible possible. He skims over heavy moments that would give Steve Jobs a more three dimensional portrayal (Jobs screwing Wozniak out of bonus money, his adoptive parents dying, his battle with cancer...) At least Walt gets the perspective other people who were involved, but just scrapes the surface without digging deeper.

I'd honestly rather read transcripts of the interviews. I wouldn't count out ever seeing them since the book seems to have been rushed to print to cash in in a timely manner after Steve Jobs died. I guess Steve couldn't bend reality far enough to make Issacson do a decent job with the official biography.

As another reviewer mentioned, anyone interested in this book needs to listen to John Siracusa's critique on the Hypercritical podcast, episode 42. His list of criticisms is vast and rightfully damning.

The long and short of it is that Issacson ruined a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to write a biography with direct access to Steve Jobs. There is no evidence that he made any effort to understand the industry Apple is in, nor the technology it created with Jobs at the helm. The book is riddled with technical errors: getting the name of the company wrong ("Apple Computers"), continuously referring to Mac OS X as "OSX", misattributed photos (one with Jobs and Woz and an Apple II+ is labeled as "in the garage" in "1974", despite the fact that the II+ came out in 1979 and they are obviously sitting in Apple's Cupertino offices), and some quotes attributed to folks like Bill Gates that just sound nonsensical.

Even more damning is that the strongest parts of the book, such as the creation of the original Macintosh, are obviously relying heavily on existing documentation such as Andy Hertzfeld's fantastic Revolution in The Valley [Paperback]: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Otx). Once we get to the era of Job's return to Apple in 1996, the book becomes very superficial. Issacson suddenly switches from a chronological narrative to a product-based one, and we learn virtually nothing new about the creation of some of the most revolutionary products in history (e.g., the iPhone). I found this pretty unforgivable, as this is not only some of the most important technology in history, but also arguably Jobs' greatest triumphs. Really, the books turns into a superficial history of Apple, and not a biography of Jobs. We learn nothing new, which is a grievous sin given Issacson's access to Jobs.

I will admit that the writing is competent, if not inspiring; I tore through the book pretty quickly. But, in the end, I agree with Siracusa that Jobs simply picked the wrong guy for the job. Any reader of this book would do well to listen to Siracusa's critique, and then go hunt down some of the far better books that have been written about Apple.

Steve Jobs cared about the details. This book doesn't. Steve Jobs said Apple lived at the intersection of technology and the humanities. This book should have positioned itself there as well, with powerful writing that demonstrated a mastery of the technical subjects on which it must focus. It does neither. I can only hope that, someday, Siracusa, or perhaps John Gruber, will take up the task of writing a far more insightful, inspiring book about Jobs' life. Steve is one of the giants of our age, and he deserves better.

Unlike so many books in the Kindle format, "Steve Jobs" loses absolutely nothing. The the jacket photos as well as the B&W photo section of SJ are bright and clear. Isaacson's color portrait is likewise tastefully sized. The links to book content as well as Simon & Shuster's web content are not intrusive. The lightly populated "book extras" with links to Shelfari.com and other SJ Kindle books is welcome. The Background Info section has a curious formatting error "Inside Steve's Brain (null)".

In a bit of irony, I chose the Kindle version over the iBook because Amazon provides a reader for my Mac.