Think different about Jobs

The true costs of these peoples' behavior is never on themselves.

Steve Jobs was obsessed with his mainstream legacy, not the poorly informed opinions of a bunch of narrow-minded tech news enthusiasts. His mainstream legacy hasn't changed because of this book.

This isn't the first book, article or interview that openly discusses Steve Jobs darker side. I haven't read the book, I'm not a Steve Jobs fan.

The book could very well be a hack job, but I doubt it. Nobody is a perfect human being. A book which follows both the amazing successes and the temperament and attitude which created them in an honest way is likely an effort to humanize Steve Jobs. I can understand why you wouldn't want your idol to be humanized. Why you don't want to read about their flaws. But at the same time, Steve Jobs was human.

I believe you are correct about Next and OS X, and I can't imagine bill gates saying 'none of the NeXT code made it into OS X'. Aren't they both still today based on the same kernel? Maybe Issacson misunderstood something, or maybe you misread it.

Either way, my point is that Steve Jobs flaws are widely known, but some of these flaws may have been responsible for his business success, some may have been detrimental to his personl successes. This we'll never know.

What we do know is that the man wasn't a god or a saint. He was a man, with character flaws just like the rest of us.

You seem to have taken it very personally, but I seem to recall the 60 Minutes piece saying that Steve didn't want to see the book, but gave his wife the responsibility of making sure it was true and fair.

It's a Kindle Keyboard. I just found it ironic that a competing product to the iPad was crashing when reading the biography of the person responsible for the iPad. That's all.

I think mine has an issue with the battery level sensor, and that it was actually very low on power. I do not have any cover for it.

In terms of my businesswoman comment, it is based on my experience, as is very clear, and accordingly is neither 'wrong' nor 'sexist'. Your experiences may differ.

Sentences like this are why the phrase "mobile war" should be taken away from all of us and placed on the high shelf next to the cookie jar. "Mobile war" is an exciting idea – much more exciting than "competitive mobile marketplace" – and so we like to think in these terms despite how misleading they are.

There is no mobile war. Apple is not out to extinguish Android. Google's not out to extinguish the iPhone. We're talking about a market of how many people, half a billion?, a billion?, billions?, and that many people means that everybody's going to want something different.

Me? I love my iPhone 4. I'm not a code hacker, see. My iPhone is the tool I use to hack the world around me. It gives me a camera (photo/HD video) that I can whip out at any moment. It lets me access my bank on the fly. It's got all the cutting-edge casual games I'm researching as part of my study on games. It lets me write on the fly (poetry, thoughts, essays) and have my writing waiting on my computer when I get back. It's an ambient music generator and a PDF reader that plays public radio and Pandora and, with the new GarageBand, is also my ideal recording device, since I prefer convenience of location to anything else. Now I can put a microphone in a backpack and walk to a park with some friends and record tracks with incredible ease. That, to me, is a hack.

I'm pretty much a huge Apple fan, but I understand people who aren't. Which is why I find lines like

> If android dominate and crush iphone and apple tomorrow, that is fine with me. Somebody can alway polish their own android version and make it like the magical apple products that I hear so much about.

disquieting. You have your Android phone! Why must you wish misfortune on my choice? I know far more Android fans who wish for Apple's demise than I know Apple fans who want Google to go under. Choice is good! And part of that choice is choosing what the focus of your "hacks" are. For me it's not computers, so I can benefit from a closed computer. For you it is computers, and we have open source.

The other disquieting thing about your comment, to me, is that you think Apple's "magic" is simply a matter of polish. As if you just wipe it with a rag for a few months and suddenly it gleams. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of UI/UX design. Achieving the level of elegance that Apple products frequently (not always) possess requires tremendous focus and talent. What's more, Apple's product polish doesn't just extend to their own software: they have a great history of encouraging top-notch developers to design for them. My favorite applications aren't Apple's apps; things like Notational Velocity, Coda, Sparrow, and Reeder have all made my life significantly simpler, and it's no coincidence that they were all designed by Mac-users for a Mac environment. Which is why even though Microsoft's new mobile OS is itself elegant and beautiful, I still much prefer the iPhone to Windows. It's where all the apps are. Not because Apple was the first to launch an App Store (though that helps), but because Apple encourages the perfectionism and user focus that makes its top applications great.

We can argue the semantics of what counts as hacker within your personal taxonomy all day, but that's useless. Jobs did great things that benefitted a lot of people, myself included.