Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson by Steve Johnson

It's easy to understand why someone would read a biography of a person long dead. Times change, details are lost, and it takes skill to put the facts back together and re-contextualize a life from a different era. It's harder to get excited about a biography when you've been watching the subject's every move for a decade, living through the same events, experiencing things as they happen, and forming your own judgements about their actions in real time.

I've been reading about Steve Jobs for about ten years now, since just before I entered high school. I followed MacWorld and WWDC keynote liveblogs minute-by-minute as the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad were unveiled. I've read every article on folklore.org and spent three months as an intern at Apple. I once ate lunch ten feet away from the guy. (Not that I gained anything from that experience, other than delicious gelato on a summer's day in Cupertino.)

I still bought Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. I finished it an hour ago.

It's a great read, and it gave me exactly what I wanted: an account of how Jobs grew from the loose cannon he was in 1986 to the company- and future-builder he was in 2001. Most Jobs stories, like my Apple employee orientation, use the timeline "1984: Macintosh released / 1997: Steve Jobs returns to Apple and invents the universe." The biography is a much more useful tale that cuts through the tech press's bipolar perception of the man.

For the first two thirds of the book, Isaacson does a good job of telling a well-rounded series of stories about Jobs's life. He interviews interesting and relevant people from both sides of controversial events and doesn't indulge himself by over-analyzing. In particular, he gives detailed accounts of Job's relationships with his girlfriends, wife, and children. His unique retelling of the 1986 executive power struggles felt like they belonged in Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power.

He does tend to credit Jobs a little too much with various inventions, but that's a common mistake and easy to get past.

The last third is a bit more tedious, enumerating the various Revolutionary Product Launches and the various famous people Jobs had meetings with. It feels like a summary of the last ten years of tech press for people who haven't been paying attention. It isn't even a good summary. Once all the key players like Ive and Cook came together, the story was effectively over. If you've been following technology at all for the past decade, you can skim the last third.

Stories aside, the best thing about this book is that it raises the bar for talking about Jobs. I used to get really pissed off during any given conversation about him because most people had very simplistic viewpoints based on Apple products and hearsay. Now that there's a popular source of better information, people have been generally less moronic in their statements about his life and work. In fact, that was one of the major reasons he wanted the biography written. In his own words, from the end of the book:

When I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn't know anything. They'd get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.

Well, now they have. (And they're blogging about it one chapter at a time.)

What Now?

There has been at least one Mac in my house since I was born in 1989. They have always been wonderful machines, even with their issues during the Dark Years. When the original Mac was released, and for several years afterward, it was a statement about the nature of technology and the way we should be thinking about computers. There are still several revolutions to go before technology finally gives the human race what it needs, but I will always love the idea of the Mac, and I'm so glad it finally became a high quality machine in addition to being a statement.

Now that Jobs is gone, we are left with another statement about technology and the beginning of the mobile revolution. I'm not in love with iOS the way I'm in love with the Mac, but it proves that fresh starts are still possible in computing, and it's brought new excitement to an already exciting field. While I'm a little disappointed about missing the original computer revolution, I'm hardly disappointed at this one. I used to be afraid that we would get stuck with awful platforms as an accident of history. iOS and the reemergence of the Mac have proven that fresh starts and power shifts are still possible and beneficial.

Will Apple continue to be successful? For at least another ten years. At that point, I hope the revolution will have gone far enough that it no longer matters. I don't care if Apple lives or dies, only that individuals keep pushing technology as much as Steve Jobs did.