
Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it - pmattos
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/11/15/siracusa-jobs-bio
======
pwthornton
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 Gates as saying that the problem with the NeXT
computer was that the optical drive had too low latency. Either Gates didn't
say this and Isaacson got it backwards because he doesn't know any better, or
Gates had a momentary slip of the tongue that Isaacson should have known
enough about to correct.

Isaacson asserts that Apple did not use NeXT for the basis of OS X, which is
just patently false (Isaacson also refers to OS X as OSX). He claims that
Apple evolved the existing Mac OS into something NeXT like. The truth is that
Apple took the NeXTStep operating system and added some classic Mac OS APIs
and features to it. OS X wasn't a complete break from the past, but it's
entire core and its Cocoa API (and objective-C) are pure NeXT.

Because Isaacson doesn't understand this distinction, he completely glosses
over the importance of OS X to Apple's revival. Without OS X, Apple would
probably be dead today or maybe just making portable music players. Classic
Mac OS was not going to cut it and it was falling behind Windows.

Classic Mac OS was significantly worse than NT-based Windows OSes, and would
have been completely crushed by XP. OS X, on the other hand, provided a viable
alternative to XP and it successors. Apple has gained market share because of
OS X and how good of a modern OS it is. The Classic Mac OS was about to sink
the entire company.

There are plenty of other examples like this in the book. Isaacson also
doesn't ask many followup questions or do in-depth research. The best
researched parts of the book are the beginnings chapters which are based on
previous books by other authors.

This is a good biography for people not that into technology, but for anyone
remotely interested in the technology, it's not that good. I'd still give it a
6 or 7 out of 10, but it could have been so much more. This is the only guy
who ever got this kind of access to Steve and the people close to him and he
botched it.

~~~
thought_alarm
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 is to completely miss the point.

~~~
msbarnett
> 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 because it's so
facile.

You write:

> 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.

But I disagree. It doesn't actually provide much of any value or insight, and
does almost nothing with its access to Jobs.

Siracusa picks out a couple of the many good examples of where it completely
just glosses over an interesting story that could have been combined with the
unprecedented access to Jobs to develop some real insights.

One is the whole arc of Apple being involved in the founding of ARM, starting
a mobile initiative with the Newton, divesting their shares of ARM, and
eventually relying heavily on them in their new mobile technologies. What does
Jobs think of this arc? Was the divestiture of their investment in ARM a
mistake, looking back?

This book sure as hell doesn't know, because none of this even occurred to
Isaacson. He merely writes that "Apple uses ARM chips in their mobile
devices".

Isaacson writes of Apple "buying PA Semi and using them to build the A4
chips". Facile overview fluff. They bought them years prior to the mobile
stuff. Why were they purchased? Was there a plan to roll their own PPC chips
when they first bought them? How did the transition to Intel impact their role
in the company, and what expertise are they bringing to mobile? Unexplored.

"Antennagate". Isaacson gives it a one sentence "engineers were worried that
the housing might interfere with antenna operations". He doesn't _use_ his
access to Jobs to dig into the story. Why was the decision made to go ahead
with it? What was Jobs thinking in the run up to the press conference? How did
they decide to take the tone they did in dealing with the issue?

Isaacson doesn't dig into this because Isaacson doesn't dig into anything. He
just lays out facile overviews of events that could have been gleaned from any
publicly available tech coverage. He completely squanders the unique position
he was in with respect to unprecedented access to Apple and Jobs.

~~~
thought_alarm
> 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.

~~~
msbarnett
> Do you think there's an even remotely interesting, non-obvious answer to
> that question?

I'm sure of it. The answers to those kind of multi-faceted, tradeoffs no
matter which direction you favor questions are precisely what provide real
insight into someone's character and decision making, and precisely what
Isaacson failed to pursue.

> And do we really need Steve Jobs to answer questions about PA Semi? Is that
> how you would spend your limited time with Steve?

Getting answers to questions that no one else could answer about what his
thoughts and motivations were for making moves that still aren't really
understood by many observers? Absolutely.

It would be _so much_ better than a 600 page mess of regurgitated material
from folklore.org and fluffy, uncritical overviews of the last ten years.

Take the App Store. Isaacson devotes all of a couple of sentences to
mentioning that Jobs was initially against it, but was talked around to the
idea. He completely squanders a fascinating exploration of Apple, Jobs, the
myth of Jobs as font of all of Apple's good ideas, and the dynamics of one of
Apple's most critical successes in the last few years. What were his
objections then, and what are his thoughts on it now? Who talked him into it,
and how did that play out? How did they approach the idea once Jobs was
convinced?

We get no investigation, no insight, nothing of value. Just a declarative
sentence from Isaacson stating the obvious, and it's on to the next facile
overview.

------
blinkingled
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.

~~~
nirvana
False Dichotomy. Isaacson didn't present "all sides", he only presented one
side, which was his uninformed and ignorant opinion. Often he would quote
Steve saying something and then say "but that's a lie" or "that's the reality
distortion field talking", or "even Steve seems to believe the reality
distortion field", as if he (Isaacson's) opinion of the truth was sacrosanct
and what Steve (The guy who was present for the events) was saying was
obviously false because Steve is "well known" to have a "reality distortion
field". At best, Isaacson quotes people who are uninformed or being dishonest
in "proving" that Jobs is wrong-- most hilarious example was quoting Bill
Gates claiming that none of NeXTSTEP made it into OS X. Apparently Isaacson
wasn't aware enough hot the issues to realize how absurd that claim is.

IF the book had presented all sides, say, quoted Steve, and then Bill Atkinson
and Andy Hertzfeld on an issue and then gotten Woz's or Raskin's opinion of
who was right, and Steve, Bill and Andy disagreed in what they said, and the
reader was given the opportunity to decide for themselves what the truth
was... then that would be "presenting all sides." However, I can not think of
a single incident where Isaacson quoted more than one person, and in most
cases he just asserts that Steve is lying.

The truth is, there is no "Reality Distortion Field". The term itself is a
joke. The claim that Steve can get away with lying is a piece of propaganda
that has ben perpetuated for decades by Apple haters. (and they have to,
because the people who hate Apple are jealous because Apple produces better
products, they can't really bash Apple for being better, so they have to
resort to smears.)

I've paid close attention, and in every case of Steve Jobs saying something
that people claimed was a lie, I've yet to find one where he publicly tells a
flat out lie. He's been wrong in his opinions, but that's quite different than
lying.

For instance, he was quoted as saying that "people don't read anymore"...
haters claim this means that he claimed Apple would never make a kindle
competitor, but that's not what he said. He identified a core problem that the
kindle, and later Apple, were trying to solve. That's not a lie-- people don't
read anymore, compared to how much they used to read in the past.

People lying about Steve Jobs-- as Isaacson does-- does not change the facts
about what Steve Jobs said and did.

I know that's the strategy. For decades haters have been lying about the PARC
visit, and claiming that Apple "Stole" from PARC. They simply ignore the fact
that Apple got a license agreement from Xerox, paid Xerox in pre-IPO Apple
shares, and that the whole thing was on the up and up. They feel that if they
just repeat this lie, over and over, and in every context, even when places
where it isn't relevant, they win every argument. In fact, it has gotten to
the point where some apple haters really are completely ignorant-- they've
just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible since there
was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact) enough time that they think they can
repeat it and not be held accountable. Here on Hacker News, one actually said
to me "Its widely accepted that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox, why do you
even bother disputing this fact?" .... when it is not a fact at all.

Now these same people are spreading the lie that Google is Open while Apple is
closed. Truth: Both Apple and Google release the operating system as open
source, and both Apple and Google keep as closed source the application layer
where their proprietary apps live. For Apple, that's the UI, for google that's
the Google Apps. The Lie: Touch screens have existed for years before the
iPhone: The truth: Multi-touch is a new, non-obvious, and very innovative
invention.

You can't change reality be repeating a bunch of lies over and over and over
and over and over.... but you can make a lot of uninformed people believe it.
And that's the goal.

Unfortunately, Isaacson's book perpetrates many of these lies, despite having
access to the sources of truth.

I don't think Isaacson is an Apple hater... I just think that he felt there
was more profits for himself by feeding the myth of Steve Jobs, rather than
biographying the real Steve Jobs.

Edit: Whoops. Bill Gates was "claiming", _not_ "flaming"!

~~~
cooldeal
Not sure if I am replying to a troll(plus much of the above is copy/paste or
very similar to an earlier comment from you).

>they've just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible
since there was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact)

The Apple haters also seem to uploading fake videos of a old Xerox GUI on
Youtube! /sarcasm

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYlYSzMqGR8>

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q&feature=related)

> Both Apple and Google release the operating system as open source, and both
> Apple and Google keep as closed source the application layer where their
> proprietary apps live. For Apple, that's the UI, for google that's the
> Google Apps

Sorry, Google Apps is not an application layer, however you wish it would be.

~~~
myspy
They had no real GUI in the 70ies, it was a terminal with mouse control. The
GUI comes at the end of the 70ies, beginning 80ies and the guys from Apple
came over, at that time, to see the concepts and prototyps.

From there, they started their own GUI metaphor.

I like the part in the video, when the guy inserts this big magnetic storage
:D

As for Apple, the kernel is open source, but the whole Cocoa layer is closed.
As for Android everything must be open, apart from the Google applications. Or
not?

------
sounddust
My complaint about the bio is that Isaacson had exclusive access to Jobs for
at least a dozen multi-hour sessions, and yet there's actually very little
content in the bio that hasn't already been retold through other sources. What
I hadn't already heard could have probably filled one chapter. It doesn't
matter that Isaacson isn't tech-minded; any competent reader can deduce the
correct meanings from his mistakes. Nor is it being too positive or negative
toward Jobs, as the reader can make their own conclusions from other sources
anyway. It's that he seems to have squandered the only opportunity anyone had
to obtain more information about Jobs' life.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Maybe media's access to Jobs was bigger than everyone thought, after all.

Maybe. I don't really know, I'm just hypothesizing.

------
deyan
I read the other comments here and found them lacking significantly. It seems
that many folks did not actually listen to the full podcast (available here:
<http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42>).

Personally, I am usually extremely skeptical of Gruber and about as far from
an "Apple fanboy" as you can get. I also approached the show very skeptically.
However, the critique in the podcast was very good. The technical and factual
errors and the shallowness and the retelling are all things that many others
have pointed out and they are all good points. But the critique makes a bigger
point:

Namely, that Isaacson did not do his job of actually giving us important new
insights into what and how Steve Jobs "ticked." There are some great examples
of that point towards the end of the podcast. For instance, the point about
the ad hominum fallacy is fantastic and I really wish Steve was called on that
and we had a deeper understanding of what he really thought. Or the various
examples of Apple building its strategy from the ground up rather than the
image that the media likes to paint of Steve Jobs as the all-knowing ship
captain who knows and foresees everything.

It's all too bad because I think we as a society and of course Silicon Valley
in particular could have benefited tremendously from a deeper exploration of
Steve Jobs.

------
dinde
My main complaint from the book is that Isaacson injects his own opinion too
strongly and too often. He writes it like a novel, with him guiding us to the
conclusions he has prepared for us. Instead I would have preferred it be
written like a well-written wikipedia entry, with numerous sources presented
and the reader being granted the freedom to come to his own conclusions. This
bothered me much more than any technical inaccuracies.

I think this touches on a larger social issue. I believe that the younger
generation is more sensitive to being manipulated about what to think and
feel. Before the internet, we relied on experts to present us with the facts
and the conclusions; there is now greater awareness that there are always
multiple sides to any story, and we prefer hearing all of them before making
up our minds.

As an example, I recently watched an investigative journaling television show
with my parents about the dangers of laser eye correction. I was struck by how
unaware they were of the different methods that were being used in the show to
guide their opinions (music, poor-quality hidden cameras, etc). To me, I
wasn't given nearly enough objective facts to come to any sort of conclusion,
but to my parents, the conclusions presented by the experts were enough.

Isaacson writes like an expert, but we don't want an expert, we want a fact-
gatherer.

------
ljlolel
I thought it was a bit too fawning. Isaacson's thesis is exactly the one Jobs
wanted to build: that Steve was at the intersection of technology and humanity
and succeeded. This theme is ever-present and is included at the end with
Steve's own words. A more critical book might have investigated more whether
that is true rather than rehashing a lot of stories that I had already read.

I loved the book anyway.

~~~
slantyyz
Really? While I have high regard for Jobs' many accomplishments, after reading
(or more accurately, listening) this book, I didn't end up with nearly as much
regard for him as a human being.

------
molecularbutter
The gist of the complaints seem to be that the bio is about Steve Jobs and not
more about specific Apple events (maybe they missed the title?) and that
Isaacson's editors didn't catch a few typos in their rush to publish soon
after the death of Jobs.

~~~
gnaffle
I think the gist of it rather seems to be that the lack of technical knowledge
means that there's a lot of insights into Steve Jobs thinking that isn't there
because Isaacson doesn't know which questions to ask and what stuff to
research. After all, that is part of what made Jobs noteworthy. The book is
full of detailed examples from early Apple history, but that's only because
they've been well documented by other people.

Likewise, he barely touches on Jobs personal beliefs and his connection to Zen
Buddhism. Wouldn't it be interesting to ask Jobs more about that? We only get
a few quotes, the most substantial is lifted from his graduation speech.

~~~
molecularbutter
Yes true, but I suspect publishing was rushed forward due to his untimely
passing, and thus there was not adequate time to elaborate on some of the
personal things we'd all like to know more about. I am satisfied with the
book, but I do hope that Isaacson publishes his notes or better yet, his
recorded interviews, down the road.

------
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.

------
S_A_P
I finished this bio a few weeks ago, and I remember just a sense of wanting
more. There were a few parts I found very painful to get through, and I felt
that some of the early apple II/Lisa/Macintosh stuff paraphrased from
Folklore.org. I also kind of feel that Isaacson kept his analysis and insight
into Steve very superficial. I wanted to know more about how he thinks than
was presented. More about his creative process, more about his philosophy on
design. While these subjects were addressed to some extent, they were very
superficial and high level. I also recognize that I may not be the typical
person who reads this, as I have spent time reading folklore.org and other
sources. On the whole though, I just feel that it did miss they mark a bit.

------
igorgue
I think he's being "hypercritical" literally, I also think that Gruber and
Siracusa are more like jealous that they didn't get to write the book (not
that they qualify for that job).

The book is not perfect but we (the tech community) are not the target.

------
benreyes
I haven't finished listening to the podcast highlighted in this post but a
point to note is that the book was rushed into print which may have affected
the Isaacson's writing quality.

~~~
pwthornton
It's written in the bare prose of a journalist. It's not bad writing, but it's
not the kind of writing that is enjoyable to read for the sake of how well it
is written. It reads like a string of a newspaper or magazine pieces strung
together.

I suspect the many typos and small errors were caused by the book being
rushed, however.

------
joejohnson
Ah, god. Please stop posting this garbage. He says barely anything (usually a
rant with little details or insight) and people eat it up. Gruber is a
dramatic fanboy.

------
loboman
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.

~~~
phillmv
I listened to the podcast over the weekend.

In a nuthsell, Isaacson doesn't understand computing, or the computing
industry, and so he let a lot of errors in (OS X contains no NEXT code) and
spends a lot of time focussing on things that don't matter.

It's more important because he was the one and only guy that was given that
much access and he blew it. He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a
lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well
researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for
everything else he takes people at their face value.

~~~
slantyyz
_He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the
bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other
sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their
face value._

I think you've just summed up modern mainstream journalism.

------
jbail
"Hypercritical" is a great name for that podcast. Over an hour of nitpicking
was more than I could stomach. I haven't finished the book, but what I've read
wasn't _that_ bad.

------
marchdown
Is there a transcript? Or, alternatively, can anyone recommend some speech
recognition software that could facilitate transcription?

------
hollerith
>Isaacson blew it, a one-time opportunity forever squandered.

I wish someone had given Jobs the fizzbuzz test and reported the results.

------
ckenst
Looking forward to reading this book but thought the podcast was interesting.

------
cstefanovici
Gruber blew it. This is a bunch of nonsense.

~~~
Hari_Seldon
With all due respect, I disagree. This book was widely anticipated and given
the unprecedented access that Isaacson had to Jobs' family and Apple execs
past and present, this book was mediocre at best.

Personally I was really looking forward to it, when I started reading the book
I kept making allowances, thinking that maybe I was expecting too much. I
don't read many biographies, so perhaps this is how it's done, after all, the
Author wrote an apparently well regarded biography on Einstein.

But Siracusa nails it, when he says most people don't understand theoretical
physics, so a biographer can get away with not understanding the stuff that
Einstein is famous for (paraphrase). The same is not true for tech, it's
forgivable to not know this stuff, but it is unforgivable that seemingly he
didn't even try, as evidenced by his obvious lack of insight into the
motivations of the man he was writing about.

I would love to see someone like Gruber or Siracusa write the definitive
biography of Steve Jobs, because the Isaacson biography isn't that book.

------
cooldeal
Any transcript of the podcast available so that people at work can actually
read what he's talking about?

~~~
Synaesthesia
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.

~~~
slantyyz
_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.

~~~
togasystems
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.

------
shareme
I think you guys are blowing it.. ISaacson blew it not because he goofed on
tech details.. but because he put forth a failed thesis that a human being
that fails at enjoying and passing on humanity to others somehow succeeded at
device items to change humanity..

In comparison, the founder of Be Inc and MS come closer to matching Isaacson's
thesis than Jobs does..

------
jellicle
TLDL; Jobs biography not fawning enough for Apple fanboys.

The complaints include that Isaacson used "spike it" in reference to killing a
story, without explaining it, and that Isaacson wrote "ATM machine" in the
book - which if not originally correct, is clearly in popular use today (see
also "PIN number").

Clear, penetrating, insightful grammar criticism from Gruber.

~~~
kennystone
The book is very gossipy and does a decent job with Jobs messy personal life,
but he completely failed to capture Jobs' and Apple's impact on the industry.

~~~
goatforce5
My favourite bits of the book were the bits dealing with his personal life.
It's a side of Steve that was never really revealed before.

------
bgurupra
I think it is time to move on with the critique of Jobs' bio and life.I read
the whole bio and the net net I got out of it is that

1)Awesome design not just has aesthetic value but also a lot of practical
business value

2)Focus Focus Focus on a few things to make them as perfect as possible - may
be expensive in the short run but generally pays off in the long run

