Many MacDailyNews readers have been emailing us with their reactions and mini-reviews of “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple co-founder.
The comments we’ve received so far range from “loved every page of it” and “couldn’t put it down” to “impersonal and detached” and “missed the full gist of the man.”
If you’ve read the book, what did you think of it?
“Steve Jobs” is available via Apple’s iBookstore for US$14.99 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch here.
Apple’s Phone 17 Plus will come with a smaller screen than the 6.7-inch display on the current-generation iPhone 15 Plus…
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, will re-team with Susannah Grant and Sarah Timberman to develop “Long Island Compromise” for Apple TV+ with…
The NBA’s exclusive negotiating window with incumbent media partners Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery will likely pass without a deal…
As Apple and other global tech firms to look beyond China to secure their supply chains, cut costs, and open up new markets, Apple is…
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) scaled back its outlook for a chip market expansion, cautioning that the smartphone…
I thoroughly enjoyed it. (Not much of a review, eh?)
Enjoying the hard cover at home, iBook on the road..
For an interesting conversation about the book, check 5by5.tv for The Talk Show with John Gruber and Dan Benjamin, episode #66.
I couldn’t put it down, even though every blog posted all the best parts ahead of time. Insanely great!!
I haven’t had time to read it yet. Saving it for either Thanksgiving or Christmas vacation when I have some down time.
You mean, when the stores are too crowded, when all the TV-shows happen to be re-runs, in short, when you have nothing else to do…
Same here. Read bits and pieces so far.
@vanfruniken
calm down, some people have to work. and WAY too much recently i might add…
I’m on vacation the week of Thanksgiving. it will be the first time i’ll have “free” time in months..
I went fishing a few weeks back with my Dad on his birthday, beyond that.. stuck at work. no time to read.
The average US citizen who buys a book never gets past page 17. If you search for the statistics on reading books, you find that over 80% of high school graduates never read another book in their life time. When you consider college graduates, the number drops to 50%. I wonder who is actually reading books on the Kindle?
The other 50%
I read it the day it came from Amazon. Easy read. Good biography not great. Tells it like it is. Jobs was not a nice guy. That is so related. Jobs was a driven man. So related. If you want to read a book about Apple and feel good read Woz. It tells it as it is. But Woz is a wonderful human being. After reading both books I know who I would love to sit down and have a meal with and talk about everything he had accomplished in life. And it would be at Bob’s Big Boy because he does love him some burger. mmmmmmmm
Most important book of the year.
I know there weren’t enough pages, but I wanted more on his early life. I guess the most fascinating part for me was the transition from “wandering kid” to millionaire business man. It’s good to see how human and even unexpected it all was. That, for me, was the most incredible part of the story.
Although I haven’t finished it yet, I find it a very enjoyable read. Even though some of the stuff we knew, it’s nice to get a behind the scenes view of Steve and Apple and fill in some of those gaps that we were not privy to before, i.e. Antenna-gate. I liked his frankness and his desire to put the truth out there, at least as he saw it, regardless whether it painted him in a positive or negative light. The inclusion of other unfiltered viewpoints added an extra dimension to the book and enabled us to see how Steve was viewed by others, good or bad. I highly recommend this book and wish Steve well as he endeavors to reengineer Heaven.
Haven’t read it yet.
Looking forward to it early next year.
Just finished reading it on my iPad2. The book was fabulous and Walter captured the essence of Steve. I never realized that Steve was such a complicated person and admire his passion for perfection even more. The legend lives on!
I thought it was a good read, but not a particularly pleasant experience. The author seemed to go out of his way to make this a non-flattering “warts and all” biography and I knew before reading the book that SJ had a reputation for being confrontational and often rude to the people around him.
However, I think Isaacson went to far in that direction and the result is that the first half of the book is filled with arguments, tears and angst. This may reflect reality but for the geeks among us (or at least for me) there wasn’t enough detail on the technology and the way that the products were developed.
For example, not much was explained about OSX and it’s contribution to Apple’s success, OSX is in some ways the most important and impressive achievement and the basis of Apple’s current success, but the author seemed more interested in moving along quickly to the next emotional outburst.
Anyway, a well written book, but IMHO not the definitive biography, at least I hope not.
Nice, Foundation!
I had similar feelings, and in some ways the book diminshed Jobs in my eyes. I’m only half way through it, savoring it, so my impressions are incomplete. It’s a page turner for sure. Loved the part on “Think Different.” Chaffed a bit when he said the “aluminum” antennae the Jobs and Ives thought of backfired as a design flaw. Pretty much thought that myth was dispelled….especially since the band around iphone 4 is stainless steel, and works wonderfully. The book confirmed what I have thought for years. That Apple products through their software, simplicity, and design are superior to all else.
All in all, I look forward to each evening when I can curl up with the book. I highly recommend!
I haven’t got to that part yet, but you have to remember the book is about Steve Jobs… not a technical or business impact analysis of OSX, or of Apple. Both (and many other things) formed a big part of Jobs’ life, of course, but a biography is not the place to cover them in detail.
I haven’t got to that part, either, but I would hope that we get at least as much detail about SJ’s technical achievements as we do about, say, his dad’s love of cars. “Steve Jobs the man” is reflected in his products and designed decisions to a much greater extent then any other aspect of his life.
Sure, he should have used rose color glasses so that you would have a pleasant read. Whatever. The book is about Steve Jobs the man, not about trumpeting OSX or Apple tech in general.
Yeah, but “Steve Jobs the man”, is someone who lived his whole life with a passion and workaholic attitude for technology and devices. We wouldn’t know about him otherwise. If the book doesn’t deal with this aspect of the man, adequately, then he’s just another asshole who got rich, not very interesting.
…but would you say it succeeded within a larger psychohistorical context?
: )
Yes, that’s my thinking exactly on the “warts and all” approach, that he was so intent to cover the warts that he slightly ignored the inspirational side. It’s not a damning criticism at all – the book is a great achievement – but Mona Simpson’s wonderful eulogy showed another side of the man that was really only indirectly revealed in the book.
Yes of course a eulogy is one-sided, but the Jobs that people would walk barefoot over broken glass for was kind of hidden in the book – I think Isaacson was at great pains to be seen as someone who wasn’t affected by the Reality Distortion Field.
Had Jobs lived another year, would have been riveting to get his reaction.
No other author will of course ever have the advantage of Isaacson’s 40 interviews with Jobs, so I think this is about as definitive as we will ever get, and that’s OK.
I’m sure this was the book that Jobs wanted, but from a purely selfish point of view, I would have liked to have had the book focus much more on the intricacies of his past – and future – creations. It’s not that I don’t recognized that the man had a dark side. I do. But it is his creativity and his genius that most fascinates me and most interests me.
It was pretty interesting, but I had to “auto-magically” fill in quite a bit of info gleaned from other sources when he seemed to go out of his way to write nicely-spun things about those who got in Jobs’ way. Like Microsoft.
Steve Jobs was very interesting, and this book somehow portrays this, but it is just so poorly written you feel like a first grader reading it. It keeps reminding you of what you read a page ago and so it gets very annoying.
I listened to the audiobook from Audible and finished in 4 days. So I guess you could say that I couldn’t put it down. I liked that Steve gave Walter the freedom to write it as he felt fit and didn’t demand to review it and try to censor or “paint a better picture.” Through leaks and other stories throughout the years, I felt like I already knew most of what was contained in the book but it really gave more insight and Steve’s perspective rather than things collected or reported by media – particularly his cancer.
I really enjoyed the parts about his time while starting Next and his time with Pixar. These were times I didn’t know much about Steve and it gave more insight to his character.
My absolute favorite was when Bill Gates was shown the iPod before it was released and he said something along the lines of “That’s pretty good.” I imagine he took in as much info as he could, sat on the toilet that night, and the brown Zune was born.
ROTFALMAO!!! That was funny!!
I second that! And I happened to be sitting on the toilet reading this from my iPad, so the imagery was that much more poignant.
I thought that it struck the right balance and was neither sycophantic or malicious. It was interesting to know what what was going on behind the scenes of all these important products and decisions.
In terms of information about him as a man and his personal life, I felt that the second half seemed to just be reiterating that he was an incredibly charming and talented person who could also be an arsehole. That’s a generalisation, and true or not I felt that it became a bit repetitive after a while.
The rest was brief history of his companies, and obviously the book was about him and not those companies, but for someone like him the lines blur so much that they almost become the same thing. As such I was a bit disappointed because I would have wanted more detail.
I enjoyed the book, and there was a lot of interesting material, I think ultimately he was such a fascinating individual that you’re always going to be left wanting more.
I wanted much more insight into Steve’s psychology. It’s a thorough record, yes, of all of the content of his life, but very little insight into what was going on inside. Even everyday stuff would have been interesting to probe – why’d you go for long periods eating only carrots, why were you never much into athletics, what were your favorite movies, why was LSD such an important experience – what did you see, how did it affect you, what was your relationship with your mother like, were you a mediator, why zen, what did you get out of it, what do you love most about your kids – none of that, I mean none of it, got covered. That would have been really interesting. Instead, we got a better history of his business life than any written before, with a few deeper insights into his business relationships than we had before. But the deepest we got into his psyche was that he wondered whether life is just like an on/off switch. Bummer.
Great review. I would love to know those things too
The “on/off switch” curiousity about life and death was first mentioned by Steve in an interview that he did with Fortune back in February of 1998, called The Three Faces of Steve (Google it. It’s a great interview). Here’s his quote:
“I’ll give you a perfect example. On vacation recently I was reading this book by [physicist and Nobel laureate] Richard Feynmann. He had cancer, you know. In this book he was describing one of his last operations before he died. The doctor said to him, “Look, Richard, I’m not sure you’re going to make it.” And Feynmann made the doctor promise that if it became clear he wasn’t going to survive, to take away the anesthetic. Do you know why? Feynmann said, “I want to feel what it’s like to turn off.” That’s a good way to put yourself in the present–to look at what’s affecting you right now and be curious about it even if it’s bad.”
I forgot to include the very last line from the interview:
“Life is short, and we’re all going to die really soon. It’s true, you know.”
Seems that he was chasing life while running from death, daily.
What a loss
I enjoyed reading Steve’s life story.
I did write an extensive review on 21tiger (non fiction blog), but I’ll sum it up with this: Asshole. Impresario. Artist.
We need to accept that for Apple’s products to reach the level of near-perfection in design, elegance, and simplicity, there needed to be a man with a vision, and a man who would say ‘no’ to bad ideas. The fascination with Steve Jobs is that he carried his Father’s love of craft throughout his life, and treated Apple products like the Children he never had. This man was a true artist, and a true SOB to almost everyone he knew, but he got away with it because his goals and intentions were noble. Perhaps thats why we all wept a little when he finally passed on, we’d lost a champion for artistry and purity in design. Thankfully, Jobs prepared Apple for that day: Exit Steve, Enter Jony.
RIP.
I feel like I know Jobs more than before, so in that sense it succeeded. But it felt rushed. it didn’t really ever slow down and dig deep into any one thing.
Perhaps that was in an attempt to not give away the keys to the factory, but I would have loved more depth about the idea process between Jobs and others. It felt shallow in this regard.
Rushed s a good description.
I thought it was great and I enjoyed every page of it.
I felt it was pretty balanced and I don’t think more or less of Jobs as a result of reading it… I just think different about him now.
So far I like it. It not only gives you isight to Steve Jobs, but to other people that made things happen. We all influence each other, and it’s fascinating how things happened. The Lisa project getting Steve kicked out, how the Woz simply kind of faded by not having more ambitious vision, and relegating him self as a simple engineer. It’s just amazing how Silicon Vally started and how the entire area and era gave place to this computer revolution. This book is beyond Steve Jobs, which puts in context the man him self.
A very interesting book about one of the true geniuses of our age.
If you own a business it provides valuable insight on what drive and determination can do.
We all know the items he left us with so no need to recount them but I found the business insight to be valuable.
I was left in a depressed mood upon finishing the book. Mainly for the family side of his life and how he failed to have the type of relationship with most of his children as he did with Reed or Apple.
It’s hard to digest how much passion he had for EVERYTHING he did in his business ventures.
Have read many Apple and Steve books; this one is very catching, intimate almost and one of the best biographies I have ever read. Love this book.
Having followed all things Apple since 1988, I loved all the behind the scenes and closed door, phone calls, emails that Steve made. The man had no fear of anything. That’s what I got out if it.
He had plenty of quirks, so does everyone posting.