Ask HN: Why aren't there other biographies of Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs passed more than 10 years ago.
He's most certainly an important historical figure of our time, but for some reason we are still stuck with the 10 yr-old hagiography from Walter Isaacson (which is ok-ish but feels rushed out, and was commissioned by Jobs himself).
Do you know of any other good, serious Steve Jobs biography?
81 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Extraordinary-Life-Steve-Jobs-Lives...
[0]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42
He was an asshole, so vain that he would get a new car every X number of months just so that he could be the guy without license plates, and so selfish he wouldn't give one of those dozens of cars to his daughter whom he refused to acknowledge.
So he made popular products, big deal.
What a disgusting human being he was.
A person doesn't have to be likeable to be worth reading or learning about.
Sure he was an asshole, but there is still a lot to be learned from the man.
He didn’t give them away because they were leased and you have to return them at the end of the lease.
There’s plenty to criticize about Jobs and no shortage of criticism, but at least get your facts right.
Then why did he always get the same model of Mercedes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_plate
The world is not black and white. There is no clear cut delineation between the 'good' and the 'bad'. We live in a world of subtly and nuance, where people can do good things while also doing immensely shitty things. Jobs was a fantastic business leader. He was instrumental in the founding and running of several wildly successful companies (Apple, Next, Pixar, and Apple again). His vision for Apple products shaped a decade of tech and continues to affect product design long after he passed away. He was the epitome of what makes a brilliant CEO.
He was an asshole. No doubt. He was an asshole who got some amazing things done though. You don't have to like him to recognize that, and you don't have to like him to want to learn about, and even emulate, the admirable bits.
I cringe every time someone turns up to me 'the engineer' to give their own 'Jobs lecture' of their 'new app idea'.
Bonus points if they turn up a turtle neck.
> Why does Jobs command such rabid adulation?
Why? Because he was interesting and strange. He tapped in to the zeitgeist and ran circles around all other tech hardware companies. He pushed his teams, other companies and society to bend to his influence. His company did things people didn’t think was possible. In fact, with the iPhone, the culmination of all of his projects, he made every other tech CEO look like complete assholes. All cellphones, all telcos, and everyone that didn’t have an iPhone all of the sudden looked slightly lame.
Your comment has ‘woke’ undertones, and I am So Over It
Not every historically significant person is nice or fair. Some of them were truly mean spirited, some did things in their past we now consider wrong. That doesn’t mean you get to cancel them from history. Stop trying to control everyone’s objectivity. I decide what is interesting, fascinating and bizarre for myself. Steve Jobs was interesting.
There is something truly awful in everyone’s past. It’s just a matter of if we found out about it before we decide to cancel you, too.
Note this one:
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We ban accounts that post like that. I don't want to ban you, so please edit out any swipes, name-calling, and attacks that make it into your comments going forward. (You may find it helpful to set 'delay' in your profile to give you time to review them and edit them—that's what I do.)
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622865
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IMHO, when the iPhone came out, it did not introduce almost anything revolutionary over the already available Windows Mobile PDA devices, it only simplified, polished and packaged the device way better. I still do not understand how Microsoft, considering their extensive experience in operating system development, somehow managed to lose their entire, massive mobile device market share in the course of only a couple of years. All it could have taken for Microsoft to win over Apple was to switch Windows Mobile from a cumbersome stylus-based UI to a convenient touch-based UI without wasting years and years to re-develop the misguided Windows Phone from scratch.
Microsoft is a B2B company, not a B2C.
Well, since Microsoft invested as massively into the Windows Phone as to re-develop it from scratch and ship free 1.0 devices to all developers who requested one, I would say that Microsoft did indeed want to keep their B2C market share pretty badly. Yet, they failed.
Maybe because the iPhone actually delivered much much more that was already available on windows mobile ?
Probably, it was not Apple's ingenuity that won the battle, but Microsoft's stupidity not to improve their product ASAP that lost the battle.
Ballmer was deriding the iPhone by not having a keyboard, therefore being just a gimmick not worth of being a work device.
Plus, probably in 2007 having access a capacitive touch screens was most likely not so simple as today. The availability was limited. Plus, the apps were designed around having a physical keyboard and buttons available.
There are exceptions, but they are not the rule.
BUT it felt the most futuristic piece of technology money could buy, and the high price point made it a luxury good that stood out of the Blackberries and Windows phones.
I like to think it was bought by CEOs and CTOs and executives who forced their IT dept. to support them because they were just so damn cool.
But seriously, there is a question of whether Apple won the mobile device battle because they were brilliant and revolutionary, or whether Microsoft has lost the mobile device battle because they were dumb as a bag'o'hammers and quit improving their platform for entire years.
Which goes back to my initial suggestion that the general public might have reasons not to really consider Apple to be the most important technological company of our time.
If you have an explanation, I'd be delighted.
There was more at the time than just Apple and Microsoft. iPhone also quickly supplanted Palm and Blackberry and assorted feature phones. Android was not yet out, but after seeing iPhone Google completely redesigned Android to be much more iPhone-like.
So it seems it either has to be Apple really did do something brilliant and revolutionary, or everyone else was dumb as a bag'o'hammers.
But that does not automatically mean that Apple was (literally) brilliant and (genuinely) revolutionary, it only means that Apple was right in their decision to obsessively prioritize "simplified, polished and packaged" over everything else. Being excellent at product development, manufacturing and marketing does not automatically make a company brilliant and revolutionary. I guess it depends on how you define "brilliant" and "revolutionary", but as far as I can tell Apple rather rarely invented something truly "never seen before". (The only iPhone innovation that really made me go "WOW!" was the dot-less, curve-ful retina display. Now THAT was an idea, indeed, "never seen before".)
It seems to me that while Apple of course did do something right (although not necessarily brilliant and revolutionary), everyone else (except Android) was indeed dumb as a bag'o'hammers. For years they failed to significantly improve their platforms to remain competitive and that was all it took for Apple to win.
Is he actually though? He was really wealthy, and sold a lot of mobile devices.
He was fanboyed over by a lot of mobile device enthusiasts.
Of note outside of this - he was a horrible person to work with, and died in large part of lala land medical thinking.
Is this what an important historical figure is these days?
Historical figures are typically more than just grease in the profit engine of a multinational.
By the way he sold iPhones, not generic mobile devices. :)
2. iphones are the epitome of generic mobile devices, and have been since their second gen. That's an accomplishment in and of its self - but doesn't make what I said very wrong.
He created the worlds most profitable company. That deserves some attention.
If we demand perfection of role models; then we won't get any. That is why we have them, to some extent - to learn what flaws are safe to ignore as we strive to make the world better.
Wow amazing. What a role model?
This is the kind of statement I'd expect to hear at one of those libertarian meets where they threaten you with toaster licenses.
Publicly funded research and individual effort aren't very powerful either, basically the best an individual can do is make an interesting observation that sets a corporation up to actually run with the idea.
As I noted in another comment, he was probably quite an asshole. And that is unfortunately a trait that has been true of countless major figures throughout all of history. Being an asshole is a rather orthogonal consideration.
It’s also remarkable, whether you like him or not, that he took a company on the brink of bankruptcy, and that was so trivial as to hardly matter anymore, and built a foundation that made it the first trillion dollar company in the world. Say what you want, but he was quite a remarkable businessman.
This is... nothing short of outrageous haha.
1. Thinking people will be reading about jobs in 100 years, like we read about Galileo now?
2. Thinking you're not a fanboy, after saying this.
Beyond hilarious.
> I'm just saying that whether we like him or not, Steve Jobs matters
Steve jobs really, _really_ doesn't matter. His death has had essentially zero impact on the broader world. In the world closer to him, it made some people sad, probably many more quite happy, and caused some wealth transfers. The company he ran continues to run in about the same arc you'd have expected it to. Even the stock market doesn't really care he's missing. It took a week or two for stock to recover and grow.
Also, I also wasn't talking about the legacy of the company he founded, or about the fact that Tim Cook managed to create more shareholder value than he did.
I was only thinking about the influence he had, and keeps having, on tech products and companies today.
His influence on modern technology is almost all flash and no substance. All you need to do to confirm that is look at how technology has stagnated over the past 10 years. The 70s gave us C, the 80s gave us affordable home computers, the 90s gave us desktop metaphors and friendly computers, and the 2000s gave us... the iPhone? The 2010s is even more ephemeral, as his 'legacy' has mostly just encouraged other companies to build their own walled gardens and enforce insane monetization strategies. Bud Tribble said it best: Steve Jobs' greatest attribute was creating a reality distortion field. His demeanor was what made people see the iPod as more than a hard drive with a clickwheel strapped to it, or the Magic Mouse as a legitimate replacement for a traditional pointing device (history knows how that one turned out).
Maybe it sounds like I'm being rough on the guy, but it's hard to deny that the majority of his life was dependent on hyperbole and marketing magic. His 'Disneyfication' of the consumer technology is made out to be a lot more sophisticated than it really is. Apple is barely able to hold on to that facade these days as regulators and antitrust organizations start to press them.
I wouldn't call him that. He's in second/third leaguer at best. His impact on the world was minor. He deserves biographies for sure (people with much less accomplishments get them as well), but let's not compare him to his contemporaries who were truly important historical figures of that time, like Nelson Mandela or Lech Wałęsa - people who radically changed lives of tens of millions of people.
In general, impact made by individual businesspeople is not that great, because all they do is follow market trends, which makes them fungible -i.e. if Jobs didn't push Apple to make iPhone, some other company would come up with the smartphone later on (the next step in technical/scientific progress is a logical consequence of the previous steps and is usually spotted by multiple companies/people at the same time).
Whereas in politics, the world is not an unidirectional march towards more progress, and, depending on actual leaders, things can get much better or much worse. So, a given leader makes much more of a difference. For example, if Hitler didn't want German race to dominate the world and didn't start WWII, tens millions of people would not have died - that's a huge impact in comparison. The Nazi party and even WWII could still happen without Hitler existing (somebody else might start the party to harvest all the German resentment of that period), but perhaps he'd be less rabid than Hitler, which would result in much less death - hence the actual delta of Hitler is huge. Even deltas of vanilla American presidents are much greater than Jobs'.
> My bet is that he will be remembered as a capital figure for putting half of the planet on a smartphone
He may be remembered for that, but that's because people's poor ability to assess real impact. Similarly, far more people know about Elon Musk than about Norman Borlaug - with the latter being much more impactful.
Essentially, I think Woz would have gone on to make a name for himself with or without Jobs. Jobs on the other hand, probably would have been a nobody without Woz.
Also, there is a autobiography of Woz, iWoz[0]
[0] https://smile.amazon.com/iWoz-BYWozniak-Wozniak/dp/B006Q4IWX...
Also, definitely not sure about Woz. He would probably have found a nice job, sure, but it's a far stretch to say he would have revolutionized as many industries as Apple did.
* https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/03/02/becoming-steve-...
Gruber's review of Isaacson's book:
> Note that my complaints here are not about Isaacson being insufficiently deferential. That the book is not a hagiography is to its credit. 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.
* https://daringfireball.net/2012/02/walter_isaacson_steve_job...
Here’s one from one of the original Mac engineers, Bill Atkinson: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
https://www.booktopia.com.au/small-fry-lisa-brennan-jobs/boo...
According to what metric?
On consideration, I’d really like to know more about ‘97 to ‘07. You’ve got Jobs rejoining Apple, creation of iMac, moving to Intel processors, creation of the iPod, creation of the Apple stores, culminating with the creation of the iPhone. Those ten years with some incredibly gutsy decisions did change society. But I’d want this theoretical book to be about many more people, not just Jobs.
Remember back to pre iPhone days. Each carrier had their own version of the phone. That phone came with bloatware and a curated list of possible apps you may download … from the carrier. The carrier had total control and say of the phone, it’s functionality and the apps installed.
Imagine a world today where the phone App Store and phone function itself was controlled by the carrier. The carrier dictates if Uber or Lyft is available to “their” customers. Only certain banks or restaurants are available based upon agreements with the carriers.The carrier picks the winners and losers in this new mobile economy and the world is fragmented based upon your cell phone carrier.
Things we take for granted like maps, messaging and FaceTime would be additional costs you pay to the carrier.
Because of Steve Jobs and his vision, that dystopian carrier controlled world does not exist. The new mobile and gig economy is all because Steve Jobs had the vision to wrestle control from the carriers. Name one other person in the last 50 years that has had this much effect on the world and how society has changed.
Then there is the side loading apps issue. There is only one true source for apps on iPhone, but someone can actually build an alternative app store for android phones. This seems more like walled garden activity.
Up until his death, he was in a court battle to demolish and rebuild his mansion that sat on a 6 acre estate.