Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 116 posts

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#71

Post by togasystems »

slantyyz wrote: post #54
Synaesthesia wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Brilliant reply. Most people don't want to read about technical pieces and when they are presented with them, they will most likely flip past.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#72

Post by Newky »

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.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#73

Post by tghw »

jonhendry wrote: post #66
tghw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updated with the entire quote. He seems to have a decent handle on it there.

I disagree. They kept just about all of NeXTSTEP, apart from the UI (but keeping browsers in the Finder, etc) and Display Postscript. 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 code…

Where exactly does he say that they didn't keep that stuff?

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#74

Post by gnaffle »

tghw wrote: post #58
pwthornton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does he, though? He's sort of saying that they evolved the existing system instead of jumping to a new one, but AFAIK OS X was NeXT with a compatibility layer, prettier GUI and some other changes. Saying that anyone upgrading from OS 9 would not see a whole new interface seems wrong to me.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#75

Post by jonhendry »

thought_alarm wrote: post #51
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…

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…

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.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#76

Post by martingordon »

loboman wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#77

Post by thought_alarm »

msbarnett wrote: post #64
thought_alarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 becau…

> Was the divestiture of their investment in ARM a mistake, looking back?

Do you think there's an even remotely interesting, non-obvious answer to that question? And do we really need Steve Jobs to answer questions about PA Semi? Is that how you would spend your limited time with Steve?

Antennagate. Isaacson chose to focus on Jobs's the response to the problem, and I thought he did a great job. It is a book about Jobs after all, and for the most part I found it fascinating.

I can recommend better books about Apple history, but there are none better about the man himself.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#78

Post by recoiledsnake »

tghw wrote: post #42
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…

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…

>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).

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#79

Post by __david__ »

tghw wrote: post #73
jonhendry wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. They kept just about all of NeXTSTEP, apart from the UI (but keeping browsers in the Finder, etc) and Display Postscript. 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 code…

Where exactly does he say that they didn't keep that stuff?

"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.

You can maybe squint at that quote and say it's not really false, but it certainly doesn't get it right at the technology level.

Re: Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

#80

Post by ajross »

ugh wrote: post #61
blinkingled wrote: post #5

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.

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

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?).

Post reply on HN