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Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

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Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#111

Post by leoh »

pwthornton wrote: post #19

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 Gate…

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.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#112

Post by Hari_Seldon »

cstefanovici wrote: post #69

Gruber blew it. This is a bunch of nonsense.

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.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#113

Post by ssharp »

pwthornton wrote: post #19

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 Gate…

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.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#115

Post by jonhendry »

gecko wrote: post #103
__david__ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap into a completely new system but instead to evolve the existing one." That's not really true. What they decided to do was build copious backwards compatibility with OS 9 into what was essentially NeXTStep and then re-skin the OS so it looked Mac-like. All the backwards compatibility stuff was essentially new, I believe, and not ports of the OS 9 internals…

I think it comes down to, which matters? I wrote code for OS 9 (via PowerMops, of all things), and for OS X (I shipped two major Cocoa apps), so I'll vouch for the fact that you are technically 100% correct. On the other hand, what became OS X had a radically different design than Rhapsody: even comparing OS X 10.0 to OS X 1.2, the former could run apps natively that could also run on OS 9, the former could read HFS+…

"His misunderstanding is well within the bounds of what I experienced within the non-Apple programming community at the time."

Yeah, but you didn't have access to Steve Jobs. And Isaacson probably could have also talked to Bud Tribble, Avie Tevanian, Ali Ozer, etc.

Frankly, I'm not even sure why anyone would expect Gates to have any particular authoritative insight into OS X. Microsoft's concerns would have largely involved the effort of porting Internet Explorer and Office from Mac OS to OS X. Anything new in OS X that didn't require changes in their software could be ignored.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#116

Post by molecularbutter »

gnaffle wrote: post #83
molecularbutter wrote: post #6

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.

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 p…

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.
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