“A finicky Steve Jobs picked Walter Isaacson to write the authorized biography, setting him loose among his friends, lovers, rivals and enemies in Silicon Valley,” Zinta Lundborg reports for Bloomberg. “We spoke at Bloomberg world headquarters in New York.”
Lundborg: Did he read anything you wrote?
Isaacson: No. I kept asking him, and he said repeatedly, “I don’t want to read it before it comes out, because it will be like an in-house book.”
He said to me at our last meeting a few weeks before he died, “I won’t read it right now — I’ll read it sometime in the next year.” And he had such a powerful, magical way of thinking, I was thrilled at the thought he was going to be alive in a year.
Lundborg: I was surprised by the amount of weeping he did.
Isaacson: He was very sentimental, romantic, emotional, and that’s a key to who he was. It was that emotionalism connected to a passion for perfection that caused him to be so driven.
Lundborg: When he came back to save Apple, he immediately identified the basic problem as the lack of sex in the products.
Isaacson: There was no sex, no romance, no emotion, and that was true of the computer industry.
Read more in the full interview here.