Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ ⇥

John Gruber:

The personal stuff — documentation of Jobs’s cruelty (and his talent for cruelty), his tantrums, his tendency to claim for himself the ideas of others — that’s not problematic. Isaacson handles that well, and what he reports in that regard jibes with everything we know about the man. My complaints are about outright technical inaccuracies, and getting the man’s work wrong. The design process, the resulting products, the centrality of software — Isaacson simply misses the boat.

This is the best critique of the biography you’ll read. The book was riddled with technical inaccuracies, which I can only assume were not fact-checked nor edited in order for the book to be released two weeks after Jobs passed away.

Gruber alludes to it, but I want to emphasise it: Isaacson doesn’t finish his thoughts. There are a number of instances in the book where he has used quotes or sayings related to Jobs, Apple, and the rest of the story. Yet he never contextualises nor explains the significance of those quotes. Take the Alan Kay line that Jobs quoted during the iPhone introduction in 2007:

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

This is stated in the book, but as Gruber points out, it’s never realised:

Isaacson includes that Alan Kay quote about serious software people making their own hardware, but doesn’t seem to heed it, or to recognize that it perfectly describes Steve Jobs’s career and explains the phenomenal success of Apple’s products.

Isaacson simply does not elaborate on it. The reader is left to infer their own meaning behind it, how Jobs related to it, and how it fits into the broader scope of the industry. There’s nothing wrong with leaving some space for the reader to reflect and to relate, but when quoting something that Jobs clearly saw as a mantra for the company, it was up to Isaacson to emphasise that, which he failed to do.