Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs holds up a Macbook Air in this file photo. Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster, 630 pp., $35
By Kevin Coughlin
With those steely, Zen-master eyes, the Apple co-founder stares up at me from the jacket of "Steve Jobs." I feel the trepidation related by virtually everyone interviewed in Walter Isaacson’s exhaustively researched biography. Such is the power of Jobs’ legendary "reality distortion field" that he still imposes his will, from beyond the grave.
Cancer took Jobs last month before he could read the best-seller he had authorized. Based on his binary — some would say bipolar — worldview, there’s a 50-50 chance his critique would have been a reflexive, "This is s---!"
It’s not.
Isaacson has pulled off a neat trick, refusing to sugarcoat or simplify one of the most complex, brilliant and frustrating figures in American cultural lore.
Jobs gets his proper due for transforming how we communicate. "History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors," writes Isaacson, a biographer of Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin who was recruited by Jobs so that his children might understand why he spent so little time with them.
With the Macintosh, Jobs made computers truly personal, fun and easy to use. He revolutionized music listening with the iPod and "saved" the music industry with the iTunes Store. The iPhone put the world in the palm of your hand. The iPad breathed new life into publishing. Apple Stores invented geek chic. Pixar, perhaps his greatest achievement, perfected digital animation to create characters with hearts and souls, and stories that will resonate for generations.
Even Pixar would be hard-pressed to come up with a story as fantastic as Jobs’.
He was the adopted kid with a chip on his shoulder. A prankster, Jobs sold kits to cheat Ma Bell, copied Xerox technology — and later complained bitterly about Microsoft and Google "stealing" Apple ideas. This was the college dropout who dropped acid and hatched a Fortune 500 company in his dad’s garage with a pal named Woz.
Fired by that same company, Jobs returned as its savior and beat the sharks of music and movies at their own game. He trekked to India to shed materialism and became a Buddhist billionaire, convincing us that less is "insanely great" and worth a premium. (Good luck finding a backspace key on your $2,000 MacBook Pro.) He was the high priest of finely tuned closed systems (Apple) in a holy war against that other exalted dropout, Bill Gates, standard-bearer for messy personal choices (Microsoft). In an age of cheap mass production, Jobs was the last perfectionist.
"Steve Jobs" is no fanboy exercise. Isaacson’s crisp, clear-eyed, warts-and-all treatment is culled from more than 40 conversations with a subject whose controlling nature extended to that piercing image on the cover.
As some reviewers have noted, Jobs’ amazing third act — from iPod to iPad — flies by at warp speed. Jobs and his biographer were racing the clock, and Isaacson deserves some slack for the extraordinary pressures he faced.
But how much slack should we cut Jobs?
Abandoned as a baby, Jobs denied paternity of his first daughter as long as he could; insisted weird diets made routine hygiene superfluous; refused cancer surgery when it might have made a difference; and sometimes claimed credit for others’ efforts. He belittled Joan Baez, an early flame, and seemed to enjoy bullying as sport, ridiculing nervous job applicants and loyal lieutenants with equal fervor. A sensitive tyrant, he cried when he felt wounded.
After a couple hundred pages, you wonder why nobody punched his lights out.
Isaacson portrays a marketing genius who made millions "think different." Yet no responsible parent would choose Steve Jobs as a role model. Do you have to be a jerk to change the world?
Astonishingly, many drank the Kool-Aid and came back for refills. Debi Coleman was a Mac manager for Steve Jobs.
"He would shout at a meeting, ‘You ---hole, you never do anything right.’ ... Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him."
Kevin Coughlin, former technology reporter for The Star-Ledger, is publisher of the website MorristownGreen.com.