Drawn from over 40 exclusive interviews with Jobs over two years, along with interviews with his family, friends, colleagues and competitors, Steve Jobs: A Biography pays tribute to a modern genius while avoiding the notorious “reality distortion field” that surrounded him throughout his life.
Open and reflective during his struggle with cancer, Jobs gave Isaacson his full co-operation and urged people to be honest about his mistakes.
The book starts with his childhood in the San Francisco Bay area and follows his career from beginning to end. At each step – co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in his father’s garage, revolutionising personal computers with the Macintosh, creating animated movies at Pixar or tackling the music market with iTunes – Jobs strived to combine cutting-edge technology with art and imagination.
Isaacson sees this instinct for applied creativity as a trait shared by Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin, whose lives he has also written about.
He also argues that Jobs was driven by the knowledge that he was given up for adoption as an infant – both abandoned and chosen, different from everyone else.
The early chapters capture the excitement of California in the 60’s and 70’s, when technology overlapped with counter-culture and computers became symbols of personal freedom. At times it seems more like the bio of John Lennon as the young Jobs collects Bob Dylan bootlegs, travels to India and experiments with meditation and vegan diets. He often said that taking LSD was one of the most important things he’d done in his life.
It’s interesting to see how his rebellious streak became part of Apple’s brand identity, earning the company a cult-like following.
“Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness,” Isaacson writes. He dismissed competitors like IBM, Microsoft and Google as “evil” and mocked the world of business suits and spreadsheets – sometimes alienating his corporate consumers in the process.
Unlike the analytically intelligent Bill Gates, Jobs took a playful and intuitive approach, creating products as simple as a kitchen appliance and iconic as a Porsche.
“When you took an iPod out of the box, it was so beautiful that it seemed to glow, and it made all other music players look as if they had been designed and manufactured in Uzbekistan.”
But his obsession for beauty could get out of control, like when he wrecked a piece of factory machinery by painting it blue, or demanded that circuit boards look perfect even though no-one but the manufacturers would see them. The same perfectionism that drove him to achieve the impossible could also send him off the rails.
He found nuanced decisions difficult, and had a maddening tendency to steal others’ ideas – but fly into a rage if he thought anyone was stealing from him. And he used his instinct for emotional connection to manipulate people, playing on their egos and weaknesses to get what he wanted.
One of the most interesting twists in the book is Jobs’ eventual rejection of the hacker culture that started his career.
His designs prevented consumers from tinkering with the product and put strict controls on how they could use it. A ban on iPad apps featuring pornography and certain political cartoons led Valleywag editor Ryan Tate to rant in an email, “If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution’? Revolutions are about freedom.”
Is it possible for an aggressively commercial CEO like Jobs to be revolutionary, or did Apple become the kind of Orwellian giant Jobs once fought against?
“Jangling inside him were the contradictions of a counterculture rebel turned business entrepreneur, someone who wanted to believe that he had turned on and tuned in without having sold out and cashed in,” Isaacson writes – but he leaves it as an open question.
Overall Isaacson portrays Jobs as deeply flawed, but more fascinating and endearing than the saintly hero some make him out to be.
His complex relationships with family and friends are genuinely moving, especially when he searches for his birth parents and finds Mona Simpson, the dear sister he never knew he had. By the closing chapters, it’s easier to understand the outpouring of grief over his death.
At a hefty 627 pages, the book still manages to be a fast read, the kind that will pull you in for an entire weekend. The tech-heavy chapters will satisfy computer geeks while still being engaging and simple enough for the average person.
This biography is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how Steve Jobs revolutionised computer technology, and how that technology is changing the world.
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