Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/11/15/siracusa-jobs-bio

by pmattos • 15 years ago

73 103 15 years ago

daringfireball.net

cooldeal2• 15 years ago

Any transcript of the podcast available so that people at work can actually read what he's talking about?

MattBearman• 15 years ago

Can't find a transcript, but on the podcast (http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42) the biography talk starts at about 18:00

Synaesthesia• 15 years ago

Siracusa's chief complaint is that Isaacson doesn't have enough insight into the tech world, or technology in general.

The book also just not outstandingly written. The first half is also stuff that's pretty much known from other books or sources, so if you've read a lot about Apple or Steve Jobs, there's nothing really new.

vacri4• 15 years ago

It's not much of a complaint to say that a biography about a famous man about whom a great deal has been written contains some well-known stuff.

slantyyz3• 15 years ago

Siracusa's chief complaint is that Isaacson doesn't have enough insight into the tech world, or technology in general.

I'm just speculating, but maybe that is the reason why Jobs chose Isaacson.

In the same way Apple products are designed not for nerds, but the "rest of us", perhaps Jobs wanted the same for his biography.

timmins• 15 years ago

5by5 doesn't have transcripts. However, here's the links to the two podcasts Gruber is referring to:

Hypercritical 42 - http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 The Talk Show - http://5by5.tv/talkshow/66

Careful when you listen... the entire network of podcasts is highly addictive (if you're into podcasts).

watmough• 15 years ago

I'd suggest that the podcast is worth listening to.

It's slow moving, but once Siracusa gets rolling, you can taste his frustration with the crappy job that Isaacson did with it.

edit: typo.

jellicle• 15 years ago

TLDL; Jobs biography not fawning enough for Apple fanboys.

The complaints include that Isaacson used "spike it" in reference to killing a story, without explaining it, and that Isaacson wrote "ATM machine" in the book - which if not originally correct, is clearly in popular use today (see also "PIN number").

Clear, penetrating, insightful grammar criticism from Gruber.

rimantas• 15 years ago

  > TLDL; Jobs biography not fawning enough
  > for Apple fanboys.

FYI, that book is anything but fawning.

mapgrep2• 15 years ago

The person you are replying to was suggesting that since the book "is anything but fawning," as you say, the "fanboy" critics are upset. The OP, in other words, already knows what you are telling him; in fact it was the basis of his comment.

(I don't even necessarily agree with the OP, but there seems to be some rushed reading/lack of comprehension in this thread [not just you!] and I thought I'd correct this one.)

sant0sk1• 15 years ago

You cherry picked two minor quibbles – both of which the quibbler (John Siracusa, not Gruber) admitted were minor – which were part of a litany of complaints about the book. He has so many problems with it that he didn't even finish in a single sitting.

Clear, penetrating, insightful criticism, indeed.

jiggy20112• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm just a slow reader but according to amazon the book is 656 pages long, I've never read a book of that length in a single sitting.

tvon• 15 years ago

> TLDL

Perhaps it is not good form to comment on a podcast you didn't listen to...?

edit: As a response I take TLD[R|L] to mean "it was too long so I didn't bother", however I have also seen it (more recently) as a summary to one's own long text. I took the above comment to mean the former.

mapgrep2• 15 years ago

A "TLDR" is written by someone who HAS read something for the benefit of those who haven't. Thus, TLDL, when followed by an explanation (as in this case) is implied to be written by someone who HAS listened.

(Note that there is a difference between posting "TLDR." to mean "I have not read this" and posting a "TLDR:" or "TLDR;", which means "I have read this long thing, and am trying to be helpful." It is, understandably, a confusing distinction.)

kennystone• 15 years ago

The book is very gossipy and does a decent job with Jobs messy personal life, but he completely failed to capture Jobs' and Apple's impact on the industry.

adolph• 15 years ago

That book is still being written, no?

goatforce5• 15 years ago

My favourite bits of the book were the bits dealing with his personal life. It's a side of Steve that was never really revealed before.

msbarnett3• 15 years ago

Did you listen to the podcast?

The main complaints were:

1) Isaacson doesn't know anything about the tech industry.

2) Despite knowing he doesn't know anything about the industry he's writing about, he didn't even try to learn anything about it, and it shows.

3) Because of 1) and 2), Isaacson solely focuses on everyday stuff that any lay-person can relate to; this is all fine and well and the anecdotes add color to any biography, but when it is the sole focus of the biography of a man who is interesting precisely because of what he did in and to the tech industry, it entirely misses much of the point of what people find interesting about his life.

4) As the only guy who ever had direct access to Jobs, he should have used that privilege to dig into more of the reasoning of why Jobs did many of the things he did in the industry, not to write some People-magazine style fluffy personal interest story.

5) On a nitpickier level, what little technical detail it contains is often flat-out wrong, like the claim that OS X didn't use or contain any of the software developed at NeXT.

ugh4• 15 years ago

Oh man, this is beautiful!

A clear cut demonstration that it’s sufficient to write Gruber on anything and some people will completely irrationally hate it, hate it, hate it.

pchristensen• 15 years ago

It's funny, you can put "Yegge" at the top and people will complain about it being too long. Even his tweets are over 6000 words.

loboman• 15 years ago

I'm reading and it's good so far, what is everyone complaining about? So far it seems unbiased, instead of the typical heroic novel you get in most other biographies.

phillmv• 15 years ago

I listened to the podcast over the weekend.

In a nuthsell, Isaacson doesn't understand computing, or the computing industry, and so he let a lot of errors in (OS X contains no NEXT code) and spends a lot of time focussing on things that don't matter.

It's more important because he was the one and only guy that was given that much access and he blew it. He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their face value.

pwthornton8• 15 years ago

This is really it. For a journalist, I would have expected him to ask my questions, push back at Steve more and do more research.

slantyyz3• 15 years ago

He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their face value.

I think you've just summed up modern mainstream journalism.

martingordon• 15 years ago

I actually found the first half of the book more engaging than the second half. I think part of it was that the second half felt rushed - Isaacson covered too many things without going into much detail for any of them and he made more grammatical mistakes.

My main stylistic gripe, however (which Gruber mentioned on The Talk Show), was that you couldn't tell if Jobs' quotes from the interviews or from the time the events were taking place.

The book was originally scheduled to come out early next year, I believe, and was moved up to late October around the time Steve resigned. The publishers wanted the bio to coincide (read: cash-in on) with Steve's death and we got a rushed product.

blinkingled3• 15 years ago

It sounds like some people were looking for a hagiography. I for one very much liked the biography - the fact that Isaacson made efforts to present all sides of the story is greatly valuable even though it makes the book a bit depressing to read.

I think the other issue is that the book being a bit too factual and multifaceted doesn't go well with the opinionated audience.

nirvana• 15 years ago

False Dichotomy. Isaacson didn't present "all sides", he only presented one side, which was his uninformed and ignorant opinion. Often he would quote Steve saying something and then say "but that's a lie" or "that's the reality distortion field talking", or "even Steve seems to believe the reality distortion field", as if he (Isaacson's) opinion of the truth was sacrosanct and what Steve (The guy who was present for the events) was saying was obviously false because Steve is "well known" to have a "reality distortion field". At best, Isaacson quotes people who are uninformed or being dishonest in "proving" that Jobs is wrong-- most hilarious example was quoting Bill Gates claiming that none of NeXTSTEP made it into OS X. Apparently Isaacson wasn't aware enough hot the issues to realize how absurd that claim is.

IF the book had presented all sides, say, quoted Steve, and then Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld on an issue and then gotten Woz's or Raskin's opinion of who was right, and Steve, Bill and Andy disagreed in what they said, and the reader was given the opportunity to decide for themselves what the truth was... then that would be "presenting all sides." However, I can not think of a single incident where Isaacson quoted more than one person, and in most cases he just asserts that Steve is lying.

The truth is, there is no "Reality Distortion Field". The term itself is a joke. The claim that Steve can get away with lying is a piece of propaganda that has ben perpetuated for decades by Apple haters. (and they have to, because the people who hate Apple are jealous because Apple produces better products, they can't really bash Apple for being better, so they have to resort to smears.)

I've paid close attention, and in every case of Steve Jobs saying something that people claimed was a lie, I've yet to find one where he publicly tells a flat out lie. He's been wrong in his opinions, but that's quite different than lying.

For instance, he was quoted as saying that "people don't read anymore"... haters claim this means that he claimed Apple would never make a kindle competitor, but that's not what he said. He identified a core problem that the kindle, and later Apple, were trying to solve. That's not a lie-- people don't read anymore, compared to how much they used to read in the past.

People lying about Steve Jobs-- as Isaacson does-- does not change the facts about what Steve Jobs said and did.

I know that's the strategy. For decades haters have been lying about the PARC visit, and claiming that Apple "Stole" from PARC. They simply ignore the fact that Apple got a license agreement from Xerox, paid Xerox in pre-IPO Apple shares, and that the whole thing was on the up and up. They feel that if they just repeat this lie, over and over, and in every context, even when places where it isn't relevant, they win every argument. In fact, it has gotten to the point where some apple haters really are completely ignorant-- they've just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible since there was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact) enough time that they think they can repeat it and not be held accountable. Here on Hacker News, one actually said to me "Its widely accepted that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox, why do you even bother disputing this fact?" .... when it is not a fact at all.

Now these same people are spreading the lie that Google is Open while Apple is closed. Truth: Both Apple and Google release the operating system as open source, and both Apple and Google keep as closed source the application layer where their proprietary apps live. For Apple, that's the UI, for google that's the Google Apps. The Lie: Touch screens have existed for years before the iPhone: The truth: Multi-touch is a new, non-obvious, and very innovative invention.

You can't change reality be repeating a bunch of lies over and over and over and over and over.... but you can make a lot of uninformed people believe it. And that's the goal.

Unfortunately, Isaacson's book perpetrates many of these lies, despite having access to the sources of truth.

I don't think Isaacson is an Apple hater... I just think that he felt there was more profits for himself by feeding the myth of Steve Jobs, rather than biographying the real Steve Jobs.

Edit: Whoops. Bill Gates was "claiming", not "flaming"!

cooldeal2• 15 years ago

Not sure if I am replying to a troll(plus much of the above is copy/paste or very similar to an earlier comment from you).

>they've just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible since there was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact)

The Apple haters also seem to uploading fake videos of a old Xerox GUI on Youtube! /sarcasm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYlYSzMqGR8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q&feature=relat...

> Both Apple and Google release the operating system as open source, and both Apple and Google keep as closed source the application layer where their proprietary apps live. For Apple, that's the UI, for google that's the Google Apps

Sorry, Google Apps is not an application layer, however you wish it would be.

lukifer• 15 years ago

Apple stole from PARC the same way MS stole MS-DOS: even though it was above board, they got such a good deal that it might as well have been theft.

Kylekramer• 15 years ago

Do we really need to bring up "Apple stole from Xerox" and "Google vs. Apple"? It isn't like we are in need of hearing more about either issue. I like your points about that book, but it get derailed by weird asides that don't really add much.

Edit: And if you really need proof of a single lie, here is a fairly baldfaced one: http://imgur.com/DsBxN

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

Like cooldeal, I really can't tell if this is a troll or not, so I'm not going to even bother picking apart the dozens of inaccuracies.

recoiledsnake4• 15 years ago

>they've just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible since there was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact)

I have always thought Xerox had a GUI at the time and didn't know I was being misled.

Someone help with more info or references on this?

ugh4• 15 years ago

This is not at all what the criticism Gruber linked to is about. At all. Not even a tiny bit.

ajross• 15 years ago

To be fair, this discussion isn't about that link. It's about Gruber's post, which is almost content-free. When you start a discussion with a link to a blog linking to a blog, you need to be prepared for things to get a little far afield.

And I'll admit: I'm detecting (both in Gruber's post and in the discussion here) an awful lot of simple anger at Isaacson coming out as needless nitpicking (c.f "He mispelled OS X!" above. Seriously?).

CubicleNinjas• 15 years ago

Your strawman argument here against everyone in the world besides you is almost adorable.

danthony• 15 years ago

I don't think anybody was expecting a hagiography; Jobs has too many failures and flaws for any biographer to write that book. But just because Isaacson captured how Steve Jobs could be both terrible and compelling doesn't mean Isaacson succeeded. He didn't. He missed the point entirely about why people want to read about Jobs. We didn't buy the book to learn about Jobs' strained relations with his children or what he remembers about ex-girlfriends from 30 years ago. We bought it to find out how he managed to be the right guy in the right place at the right time, time and time again, realigning entire industries to his interests.

Isaacson had a chance to uncover what made Steve Jobs tick. To understand how Jobs made the company that made the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and put giant footprints on the PC, music, filmmaking, and telecom industries. Instead we got armchair psychology and a rehash of "he's demanding to the point of being unbearable but he usually makes good calls." Why could Steve Jobs create Apple and not anybody else? He's not the only visionary in Silicon Valley and certainly not the only asshole. So why, with unprecedented access to Jobs and everyone he's worked with, could Isaacson not tell us anything new?

Maybe if you think Jobs wasn't anything special, just a fortunate narcissist, you'd be satisfied with the book. Obviously he'd be nothing without people, like Woz, Hertzfield, Tribble, Tevanian, Ive, Catmull, Lasseter, and many others who did incredible work that he could never do himself. But even that perspective leaves the question of why so many geniuses did their best work when they worked with Jobs.

Isaacson doesn't even address how Jobs learned how to run companies. I'd argue that the pivotal moment for this occurs during the NeXT days, covered by Isaacson only superficially. But NeXT is clearly the turning point of Jobs' career. Everything he did up till and including NeXT ended in flames. But after, it's success after success. How then did he finally manage to not alienate everybody and go down in a blaze of glory? How did he hang onto his team from NeXT use them to remake Apple? Not to mention Isaacson failed to understand that how NeXT's system became the foundation of everything important Apple has done since (OS X and iOS are both direct descendants of NeXT's OS).

Nor do we learn about how he worked with any of his trusted lieutenants besides Ive, like Tim Cook, Avie Tevanian, Phil Schiller, or Scott Forstall. We don't even get a sense of why they stuck by him or bought into his vision. We get some insight into the Woz relationship, but still not why they succeeded when others failed.

Isaacson had the chance to tell the story of a remarkable life in business, but he demurred. Judged against the life it chronicles, Isaacson's book is a failure.

blinkingled3• 15 years ago

It is a biography. Not a special book dedicated to helping create Steve Jobs clones. Biography by definition is an account of someone's life written by someone else. So that means it has to include Jobs' relationships along side other things.

And you are asking for too much in the rest of your comment - give me a break. Has anyone ever succeeded in duplicating someone great by copying what the person originally did? Isn't it all about originality, opportunity, luck and other intangible stuff? If I were to ask why did Einstein "get" theory of relativity and not someone else - what would be the answer to that kind of question? How would you even begin to answer it? It's ridiculous - no offense though.

And I guess you forgot that Jobs emphasized "intuition" over rationalism several times in the book. Are you now going to ask Isaacson missed asking him "how to have intuition" or "how to be at the right place at the right time"?

You aren't going to get those sort of answers - if you did, and if that sort of thing was actually useful, everyone would be Steve Jobs and everyone could be Einstein. Life and achievements are not imitable as much as you would like to think so.

For a biography the book does a decent job - if you are asking for something entirely different from a biography it's hardly the author's fault.

mehwoot• 15 years ago

So you come in with a preconceived notion of what the book should be about, and then complain that it isn't that. Don't judge a book by it's cover! Most people do buy a biography to learn "about [their] strained relations with their children" etc. The business side of his life has already been covered endlessly by so many people- a book about that would uncover nothing new.

molecularbutter2• 15 years ago

The gist of the complaints seem to be that the bio is about Steve Jobs and not more about specific Apple events (maybe they missed the title?) and that Isaacson's editors didn't catch a few typos in their rush to publish soon after the death of Jobs.

gnaffle3• 15 years ago

I think the gist of it rather seems to be that the lack of technical knowledge means that there's a lot of insights into Steve Jobs thinking that isn't there because Isaacson doesn't know which questions to ask and what stuff to research. After all, that is part of what made Jobs noteworthy. The book is full of detailed examples from early Apple history, but that's only because they've been well documented by other people.

Likewise, he barely touches on Jobs personal beliefs and his connection to Zen Buddhism. Wouldn't it be interesting to ask Jobs more about that? We only get a few quotes, the most substantial is lifted from his graduation speech.

molecularbutter2• 15 years ago

Yes true, but I suspect publishing was rushed forward due to his untimely passing, and thus there was not adequate time to elaborate on some of the personal things we'd all like to know more about. I am satisfied with the book, but I do hope that Isaacson publishes his notes or better yet, his recorded interviews, down the road.

benreyes• 15 years ago

I haven't finished listening to the podcast highlighted in this post but a point to note is that the book was rushed into print which may have affected the Isaacson's writing quality.

pwthornton8• 15 years ago

It's written in the bare prose of a journalist. It's not bad writing, but it's not the kind of writing that is enjoyable to read for the sake of how well it is written. It reads like a string of a newspaper or magazine pieces strung together.

I suspect the many typos and small errors were caused by the book being rushed, however.

ljlolel• 15 years ago

I thought it was a bit too fawning. Isaacson's thesis is exactly the one Jobs wanted to build: that Steve was at the intersection of technology and humanity and succeeded. This theme is ever-present and is included at the end with Steve's own words. A more critical book might have investigated more whether that is true rather than rehashing a lot of stories that I had already read.

I loved the book anyway.

slantyyz3• 15 years ago

Really? While I have high regard for Jobs' many accomplishments, after reading (or more accurately, listening) this book, I didn't end up with nearly as much regard for him as a human being.

bgurupra• 15 years ago

I think it is time to move on with the critique of Jobs' bio and life.I read the whole bio and the net net I got out of it is that

1)Awesome design not just has aesthetic value but also a lot of practical business value

2)Focus Focus Focus on a few things to make them as perfect as possible - may be expensive in the short run but generally pays off in the long run

ckenst• 15 years ago

Looking forward to reading this book but thought the podcast was interesting.

pwthornton8• 15 years ago

The complaints are not that the book isn't nice enough towards Jobs, but rather that Isaacson doesn't know enough about technology to make this interesting or insightful, nor did he try to educate himself before writing this book.

Isaacson is at his best when he dives into the more human and social aspects of Jobs's life. As soon as things get remotely technical, the book begins to fall a part. He misquoted Bill Gates as saying that the problem with the NeXT computer was that the optical drive had too low latency. Either Gates didn't say this and Isaacson got it backwards because he doesn't know any better, or Gates had a momentary slip of the tongue that Isaacson should have known enough about to correct.

Isaacson asserts that Apple did not use NeXT for the basis of OS X, which is just patently false (Isaacson also refers to OS X as OSX). He claims that Apple evolved the existing Mac OS into something NeXT like. The truth is that Apple took the NeXTStep operating system and added some classic Mac OS APIs and features to it. OS X wasn't a complete break from the past, but it's entire core and its Cocoa API (and objective-C) are pure NeXT.

Because Isaacson doesn't understand this distinction, he completely glosses over the importance of OS X to Apple's revival. Without OS X, Apple would probably be dead today or maybe just making portable music players. Classic Mac OS was not going to cut it and it was falling behind Windows.

Classic Mac OS was significantly worse than NT-based Windows OSes, and would have been completely crushed by XP. OS X, on the other hand, provided a viable alternative to XP and it successors. Apple has gained market share because of OS X and how good of a modern OS it is. The Classic Mac OS was about to sink the entire company.

There are plenty of other examples like this in the book. Isaacson also doesn't ask many followup questions or do in-depth research. The best researched parts of the book are the beginnings chapters which are based on previous books by other authors.

This is a good biography for people not that into technology, but for anyone remotely interested in the technology, it's not that good. I'd still give it a 6 or 7 out of 10, but it could have been so much more. This is the only guy who ever got this kind of access to Steve and the people close to him and he botched it.

tghw3• 15 years ago

I haven't listened to the podcast, but it sounds like one of the biggest nits they picked was that "Isaacson asserts that Apple did not use NeXT for the basis of OS X". Looking back through the book, I can't find that assertion, but I can find the following, at location 6379 of the Kindle version (the Kindle app tells me it's page 366):

"At the January 2000 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh operating system, OSX, which used some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT three years earlier. It was fitting, and not entirely coincidental, that he was willing to incorporate himself back at Apple at the same moment as the NeXT OS was incorporated into Apple’s. Avie Tevanian had taken the UNIX-related Mach kernel of the NeXT operating system and turned it into the Mac OS kernel, known as Darwin. It offered protected memory, advanced networking, and preemptive multitasking. It was precisely what the Macintosh needed, and it would be the foundation of the Mac OS henceforth. Some critics, including Bill Gates, noted that Apple ended up not adopting the entire NeXT operating system. There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap into a completely new system but instead to evolve the existing one. Application software written for the old Macintosh system was generally compatible with or easy to port to the new one, and a Mac user who upgraded would notice a lot of new features but not a whole new interface."

Reading that, it seems to me he got it right, except for misspelling "OS X".

pwthornton8• 15 years ago

No, there is more than that. I don't have the Kindle version, so I can't easily search through the book. But he talks a bit about Avie Tevanian and that essentially that is what NeXT gave Apple.

If I get some more time, I'll try to find the exact passage, but it's different from the one you are citing. I'm fine with that one.

recoiledsnake4• 15 years ago

>Some critics, including Bill Gates, noted that Apple ended up not adopting the entire NeXT operating system. There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap into a completely new system but instead to evolve the existing one.

Is there somewhere where Bill Gates said "none of the NeXT code made it into OS X".

That's the impression I got the other day from this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3229928

Quoting the relevant part:

>One example of this is Jobs talking about how NeXT's software gave the Mac new life. Isaacson says this is a lie, and then goes on to quote Bill Gates who says none of the NeXT code made it into OS X. Now, this is an obvious and bald faced lie on Gates' part, but Isaacson doesn't know any better. He's decided that Jobs is a liar, and therefore , whenever someone says anything that disagrees, it must be evidence that Jobs was lying.

>Reality is, OS X is NeXTSTEP with the Mac UI put on top of it, and at this point another 10 years of evolution. Gates was lying for whatever reasons Gates lies (and gates really is pathological in this regard).

From your quote from the book, Bill Gates seems to have said a very different thing, not sure one could call him a liar on that(even not allowing that people try to put a bad light on rivals).

vacri4• 15 years ago

OSX vs OS X is an editorial failure. Unless Isaacson self-published the book and let no-one view it beforehand, of course.

azov• 15 years ago

OS X is technically correct, but it's 202M hits on Google for OS X vs 82M for OSX. As far as I'm concerned both are widely used by technical and non-technical people and mean the same thing. It's a tiny mistake that could be fixed in one second, why are we even mentioning it in the context of Isaacson allegedly blewing the biography?

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

I agree about NeXTSTEP, but it doesn't matter. Only geeks care about that stuff. Do you think Isaacson's goal was to simply tell Apple geeks what they already know?

The real value and insight that the book provides is the access to Jobs during the last years of his life, as well as the people who played important roles in Apple's resurgence during the last 10 years. To nitpick the minor technical details in the book is to completely miss the point.

pwthornton8• 15 years ago

I disagree. If Isaacson can't get these details right, which other details are wrong? And if he doesn't know the facts, does he know the right questions to ask?

I'd argue that because Isaacson doesn't understand OS X and how much different it is than OS 9, he doesn't understand how important it is to the company. Without OS X, there is no iOS. I'm not asking him to write a technical book, but I do feel that if he understood some of these points better, he might have asked Jobs about them and pushed him more on these topics.

The end of life stuff is certainly interesting. I do wish on that front as well that he would have asked more questions of professionals about whether or not it would have made a difference if Steve Jobs didn't act like Steve Jobs. It's sort of implied that Steve's diet (and at times lack thereof) may have inhibited his ability to fight the cancer. Isaacson doesn't really push Steve on this or consult with professionals on it either.

msbarnett3• 15 years ago

> To nitpick the minor technical details in the book is to completely miss the point.

Which is why the criticism of those details appeared in the section of the podcast that Siracusa labelled as "minor nitpicks that didn't make the book necessarily bad, but which Siracusa was going to point out because this podcast is, after all, called Hypercritical".

The main thesis of the podcast is that the biography is bad because it's so facile.

You write:

> The real value and insight that the book provides is the access to Jobs during the last years of his life, as well as the people who played important roles in Apple's resurgence during the last 10 years.

But I disagree. It doesn't actually provide much of any value or insight, and does almost nothing with its access to Jobs.

Siracusa picks out a couple of the many good examples of where it completely just glosses over an interesting story that could have been combined with the unprecedented access to Jobs to develop some real insights.

One is the whole arc of Apple being involved in the founding of ARM, starting a mobile initiative with the Newton, divesting their shares of ARM, and eventually relying heavily on them in their new mobile technologies. What does Jobs think of this arc? Was the divestiture of their investment in ARM a mistake, looking back?

This book sure as hell doesn't know, because none of this even occurred to Isaacson. He merely writes that "Apple uses ARM chips in their mobile devices".

Isaacson writes of Apple "buying PA Semi and using them to build the A4 chips". Facile overview fluff. They bought them years prior to the mobile stuff. Why were they purchased? Was there a plan to roll their own PPC chips when they first bought them? How did the transition to Intel impact their role in the company, and what expertise are they bringing to mobile? Unexplored.

"Antennagate". Isaacson gives it a one sentence "engineers were worried that the housing might interfere with antenna operations". He doesn't use his access to Jobs to dig into the story. Why was the decision made to go ahead with it? What was Jobs thinking in the run up to the press conference? How did they decide to take the tone they did in dealing with the issue?

Isaacson doesn't dig into this because Isaacson doesn't dig into anything. He just lays out facile overviews of events that could have been gleaned from any publicly available tech coverage. He completely squanders the unique position he was in with respect to unprecedented access to Apple and Jobs.

jonhendry3• 15 years ago

I disagree. The book could have been a seminal historical document of a major actor in business and technology of the late 20th century and start of the 21st century, the sort of thing that people could turn to for decades.

But if it's barely better than a celebrity bio, and didn't ask the relevant questions, then it's an opportunity missed.

Let's face it: yeah, the 'human interest' story of Jobs' fight with cancer is interesting and will sell books, but it's not what was of value for history.

If you read about George Washington, generally you want to know about the Revolution and the founding of the US, not his final illness and the bleeding treatments he underwent that may have killed him.

Too bad Jobs didn't pick someone a) more technical, and b) more experienced writing bios of living people.

leoh• 15 years ago

While Jobs didn't have any direct control over the biography, he did spend hundreds of hours with Isaacson and certainly would have mentioned things that he would have wanted in the book, technical and otherwise; and Isaacson certainly would have included more technical details if Jobs had mentioned them over and again during interviews.

The fact of the matter is, though, that the nitty-gritty technical details are just not part of the picture for Jobs. Jobs picked at tiny details only when designers and engineers did something wrong or did something didn't lend itself to Jobs' greater artistic vision. If you're interested in exceptional technical detail, Jobs just would not have been your man.

And let's face it, if you're interested in the technology. there will be dozens of engineers and a limitless number of other writers that can write about those matters later. Gross technical detail is just not seeing the forest for the trees; and if you don't realize that fact, then you are someone that would have probably have been met with Jobs' scorn.

ssharp• 15 years ago

The title of the book is "Steve Jobs", not "Apple". I think Isaacson did a good enough job of capturing Steve Jobs the person. Missing some technical details about Apple isn't a huge deal to me. I already know them and if I didn't, I don't think I'd care.

I was much more interested in getting some perspective on Jobs the person, how he acted, how he thought, and why he behaved like he did, not some rehashing of resent technical history that is already well known.

Much like Apple's products, this book was created for the masses, not the engineers.

sounddust• 15 years ago

My complaint about the bio is that Isaacson had exclusive access to Jobs for at least a dozen multi-hour sessions, and yet there's actually very little content in the bio that hasn't already been retold through other sources. What I hadn't already heard could have probably filled one chapter. It doesn't matter that Isaacson isn't tech-minded; any competent reader can deduce the correct meanings from his mistakes. Nor is it being too positive or negative toward Jobs, as the reader can make their own conclusions from other sources anyway. It's that he seems to have squandered the only opportunity anyone had to obtain more information about Jobs' life.

Florin_Andrei• 15 years ago

Maybe media's access to Jobs was bigger than everyone thought, after all.

Maybe. I don't really know, I'm just hypothesizing.

joejohnson• 15 years ago

Ah, god. Please stop posting this garbage. He says barely anything (usually a rant with little details or insight) and people eat it up. Gruber is a dramatic fanboy.

dinde• 15 years ago

My main complaint from the book is that Isaacson injects his own opinion too strongly and too often. He writes it like a novel, with him guiding us to the conclusions he has prepared for us. Instead I would have preferred it be written like a well-written wikipedia entry, with numerous sources presented and the reader being granted the freedom to come to his own conclusions. This bothered me much more than any technical inaccuracies.

I think this touches on a larger social issue. I believe that the younger generation is more sensitive to being manipulated about what to think and feel. Before the internet, we relied on experts to present us with the facts and the conclusions; there is now greater awareness that there are always multiple sides to any story, and we prefer hearing all of them before making up our minds.

As an example, I recently watched an investigative journaling television show with my parents about the dangers of laser eye correction. I was struck by how unaware they were of the different methods that were being used in the show to guide their opinions (music, poor-quality hidden cameras, etc). To me, I wasn't given nearly enough objective facts to come to any sort of conclusion, but to my parents, the conclusions presented by the experts were enough.

Isaacson writes like an expert, but we don't want an expert, we want a fact-gatherer.

jbail• 15 years ago

"Hypercritical" is a great name for that podcast. Over an hour of nitpicking was more than I could stomach. I haven't finished the book, but what I've read wasn't that bad.

igorgue• 15 years ago

I think he's being "hypercritical" literally, I also think that Gruber and Siracusa are more like jealous that they didn't get to write the book (not that they qualify for that job).

The book is not perfect but we (the tech community) are not the target.

cstefanovici• 15 years ago

Gruber blew it. This is a bunch of nonsense.

Hari_Seldon• 15 years ago

With all due respect, I disagree. This book was widely anticipated and given the unprecedented access that Isaacson had to Jobs' family and Apple execs past and present, this book was mediocre at best.

Personally I was really looking forward to it, when I started reading the book I kept making allowances, thinking that maybe I was expecting too much. I don't read many biographies, so perhaps this is how it's done, after all, the Author wrote an apparently well regarded biography on Einstein.

But Siracusa nails it, when he says most people don't understand theoretical physics, so a biographer can get away with not understanding the stuff that Einstein is famous for (paraphrase). The same is not true for tech, it's forgivable to not know this stuff, but it is unforgivable that seemingly he didn't even try, as evidenced by his obvious lack of insight into the motivations of the man he was writing about.

I would love to see someone like Gruber or Siracusa write the definitive biography of Steve Jobs, because the Isaacson biography isn't that book.

Newky• 15 years ago

I know that a lot of people state Isaacson's lack of knowledge in the technical area as a failing but I must disagree fully with the fact that the book is anything but a revelation.

For weeks afterwards, Hacker News and pretty much every other news resource on the internet was full of posts about how Steve Jobs had affected people, almost all were positive.

This book, although at times, the design genius of Job's shines forth, paints a very realistic picture of this demanding, hurtful person who painted a picture of how he wanted his own life to be, and never erred from that. Although said like that it seem's like a very driven goal, he neglected those he was supposedly close to, while again and again putting his need for perfection in front of everything including his own flesh and blood.

I completely disagree with the post, and think Isaacson unveiled the true person behind the visionary and wonderful facade.

shareme• 15 years ago

I think you guys are blowing it.. ISaacson blew it not because he goofed on tech details.. but because he put forth a failed thesis that a human being that fails at enjoying and passing on humanity to others somehow succeeded at device items to change humanity..

In comparison, the founder of Be Inc and MS come closer to matching Isaacson's thesis than Jobs does..

S_A_P• 15 years ago

I finished this bio a few weeks ago, and I remember just a sense of wanting more. There were a few parts I found very painful to get through, and I felt that some of the early apple II/Lisa/Macintosh stuff paraphrased from Folklore.org. I also kind of feel that Isaacson kept his analysis and insight into Steve very superficial. I wanted to know more about how he thinks than was presented. More about his creative process, more about his philosophy on design. While these subjects were addressed to some extent, they were very superficial and high level. I also recognize that I may not be the typical person who reads this, as I have spent time reading folklore.org and other sources. On the whole though, I just feel that it did miss they mark a bit.

deyan• 15 years ago

I read the other comments here and found them lacking significantly. It seems that many folks did not actually listen to the full podcast (available here: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42).

Personally, I am usually extremely skeptical of Gruber and about as far from an "Apple fanboy" as you can get. I also approached the show very skeptically. However, the critique in the podcast was very good. The technical and factual errors and the shallowness and the retelling are all things that many others have pointed out and they are all good points. But the critique makes a bigger point:

Namely, that Isaacson did not do his job of actually giving us important new insights into what and how Steve Jobs "ticked." There are some great examples of that point towards the end of the podcast. For instance, the point about the ad hominum fallacy is fantastic and I really wish Steve was called on that and we had a deeper understanding of what he really thought. Or the various examples of Apple building its strategy from the ground up rather than the image that the media likes to paint of Steve Jobs as the all-knowing ship captain who knows and foresees everything.

It's all too bad because I think we as a society and of course Silicon Valley in particular could have benefited tremendously from a deeper exploration of Steve Jobs.

marchdown• 15 years ago

Is there a transcript? Or, alternatively, can anyone recommend some speech recognition software that could facilitate transcription?

hollerith• 15 years ago

>Isaacson blew it, a one-time opportunity forever squandered.

I wish someone had given Jobs the fizzbuzz test and reported the results.

Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

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