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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.
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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.
He didn’t finish his complaints in one seventy minute podcast. It’s actually a great and hilarious podcast – independently of what you think about Jobs. Siracusa is in his element.
I'll try and listen to it later, although I've never read the book. Reading stuff about people usually doesn't interest me, besides the obvious computer stuff is jobs really a particularly interesting guy? I know he did allot of drugs but so have about half the people I know socially.
The book is not perfect but we (the tech community) are not the target.
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…
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…
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Updated with the entire quote. He seems to have a decent handle on it there.
They kept the Mach stuff. They kept the Unix stuff. They kept Terminal.app so you could access the Unix stuff. They kept the Cocoa frameworks, Project Builder, and Interface Builder. They retained applications as file packages. They retained file extensions in favor of app/creator codes. They replaced interpreted DPS with Quartz. They changed the menu bar from floating tear-offs to a single menubar. They got rid of the Shelf on Finder windows.
What did they not use from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep that was of any significance? About all I can think of is YellowBox on Windows.
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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…
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=C…
From there, they started their own GUI metaphor.
I like the part in the video, when the guy inserts this big magnetic storage :D
As for Apple, the kernel is open source, but the whole Cocoa layer is closed. As for Android everything must be open, apart from the Google applications. Or not?
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…
OSX vs OS X is an editorial failure. Unless Isaacson self-published the book and let no-one view it beforehand, of course.
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.