THE LATE REVIEW: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I’m writing this on the third consecutive Mac laptop I have bought. Just as most other Apple computer users, I wouldn’t care to use a Windows machine if given the choice. Frankly though, when you get down to it, there’s not a great deal of difference. Not anymore.

So: what does this enormous book tell us about Steve Jobs? Nothing we didn’t already know; that he was a deeply unpleasant man, that his ‘reality distortion field’ was nothing more than a heightened form of bullying; that he was very nearly incapable of forming functioning relationships with other people. Most of this we knew already.

All credit to Isaacson for the interviews with those who knew Jobs at different times during his life, and more so for getting to sit down and talk to Jobs himself as that life drew to a close. But even in those supposedly revealing interviews, Jobs is still playing interviewer and reader like a card sharp plays his mark. None of Jobs’ answers have much depth, and instead bringing the conversation around to what seems to be his own question to us. Of course, it’s the question we’d all ask in the same circumstances, the question we’ll all ask at one time; what did you think of me?

Jobs would have liked you to think, and Apple would still like you to think, that he changed the world. He didn’t. He made a very small part of it a little bit easier for a very small number of people. He created, or at least took credit for creating, devices that have changed consumer spending patterns for as long as it takes for the next wave of change to come along.  He introduced a design aesthetic to a work tool and in doing so turned that tool into a lifestyle accessory.

That’s still a huge achievement for any person, whether they did it alone or as part of a larger entity, and I don’t wish to belittle it. Whether it’s as laudable as some see it is debatable; possibly the Mac pushed personal computing forwards by years, possibly the corporation’s (read: Jobs’s) refusal to play with others held the industry back.

Either way, I know that when I heard of his death, I was saddened; Jobs may have been the kind of man you wouldn’t care to know, but he at least was passionate about everything he did, and that in itself is worth saluting. Raise a carrot juice, if you choose. He’d have liked that.