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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 i

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.

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tghw 15y ago
I haven't listened to the podcast, but it sounds like one of the biggest nits they picked was that "Isaacson asserts that Apple did not use NeXT for the basis of OS X". Looking back through the book, I can't find that assertion, but I can find the following, at location 6379 of the Kindle version (the Kindle app tells me it's page 366): "At the January 2000 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh operating system, OSX, which used some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT three years earlier. It was fitting, and not entirely coincidental, that he was willing to incorporate himself back at Apple at the same moment as the NeXT OS was incorporated into Apple’s. Avie Tevanian had taken the UNIX-related Mach kernel of the NeXT operating system and turned it into the Mac OS kernel, known as Darwin. It offered protected memory, advanced networking, and preemptive multitasking. It was precisely what the Macintosh needed, and it would be the foundation of the Mac OS henceforth. Some critics, including Bill Gates, noted that Apple ended up not adopting the entire NeXT operating system. There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap into a completely new system but instead to evolve the existing one. Application software written for the old Macintosh system was generally compatible with or easy to port to the new one, and a Mac user who upgraded would notice a lot of new features but not a whole new interface." Reading that, it seems to me he got it right, except for misspelling "OS X".
- pwthornton 15y ago
  No, there is more than that. I don't have the Kindle version, so I can't easily search through the book. But he talks a bit about Avie Tevanian and that essentially that is what NeXT gave Apple. If I get some more time, I'll try to find the exact passage, but it's different from the one you are citing. I'm fine with that one.
  - tghw 15y ago
    Updated with the entire quote. He seems to have a decent handle on it there.
    - jonhendry 15y ago
      I disagree. They kept just about all of NeXTSTEP, apart from the UI (but keeping browsers in the Finder, etc) and Display Postscript. They kept the Mach stuff. They kept the Unix stuff. They kept Terminal.app so you could access the Unix stuff. They kept the Cocoa frameworks, Project Builder, and Interface Builder. They retained applications as file packages. They retained file extensions in favor of app/creator codes. They replaced interpreted DPS with Quartz. They changed the menu bar from floating tear-offs to a single menubar. They got rid of the Shelf on Finder windows. What did they not use from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep that was of any significance? About all I can think of is YellowBox on Windows.
vacri 15y ago
OSX vs OS X is an editorial failure. Unless Isaacson self-published the book and let no-one view it beforehand, of course.
- azov 15y ago
  OS X is technically correct, but it's 202M hits on Google for OS X vs 82M for OSX. As far as I'm concerned both are widely used by technical and non-technical people and mean the same thing. It's a tiny mistake that could be fixed in one second, why are we even mentioning it in the context of Isaacson allegedly blewing the biography?
  - vaporstun 15y ago
    A Google search is hardly the way to resolve that. OS X searches for anything with OS or X whereas OSX only searches for things with OSX so of course the former has more hits. I mean you're right that it's technically "OS X", but your methodology for proof is flawed.
    - vacri 15y ago
      a search for: os x does what you say, but a search for "os x" does what the GP says, and matches with the numbers cited, too.
thought_alarm 15y ago
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.
- pwthornton 15y ago
  I disagree. If Isaacson can't get these details right, which other details are wrong? And if he doesn't know the facts, does he know the right questions to ask? I'd argue that because Isaacson doesn't understand OS X and how much different it is than OS 9, he doesn't understand how important it is to the company. Without OS X, there is no iOS. I'm not asking him to write a technical book, but I do feel that if he understood some of these points better, he might have asked Jobs about them and pushed him more on these topics. The end of life stuff is certainly interesting. I do wish on that front as well that he would have asked more questions of professionals about whether or not it would have made a difference if Steve Jobs didn't act like Steve Jobs. It's sort of implied that Steve's diet (and at times lack thereof) may have inhibited his ability to fight the cancer. Isaacson doesn't really push Steve on this or consult with professionals on it either.
- msbarnett 15y ago
  > 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.
leoh 15y ago
While Jobs didn't have any direct control over the biography, he did spend hundreds of hours with Isaacson and certainly would have mentioned things that he would have wanted in the book, technical and otherwise; and Isaacson certainly would have included more technical details if Jobs had mentioned them over and again during interviews. The fact of the matter is, though, that the nitty-gritty technical details are just not part of the picture for Jobs. Jobs picked at tiny details only when designers and engineers did something wrong or did something didn't lend itself to Jobs' greater artistic vision. If you're interested in exceptional technical detail, Jobs just would not have been your man. And let's face it, if you're interested in the technology. there will be dozens of engineers and a limitless number of other writers that can write about those matters later. Gross technical detail is just not seeing the forest for the trees; and if you don't realize that fact, then you are someone that would have probably have been met with Jobs' scorn.
ssharp 15y ago
The title of the book is "Steve Jobs", not "Apple". I think Isaacson did a good enough job of capturing Steve Jobs the person. Missing some technical details about Apple isn't a huge deal to me. I already know them and if I didn't, I don't think I'd care. I was much more interested in getting some perspective on Jobs the person, how he acted, how he thought, and why he behaved like he did, not some rehashing of resent technical history that is already well known. Much like Apple's products, this book was created for the masses, not the engineers.

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tghw 15y ago

I haven't listened to the podcast, but it sounds like one of the biggest nits they picked was that "Isaacson asserts that Apple did not use NeXT for the basis of OS X". Looking back through the book, I can't find that assertion, but I can find the following, at location 6379 of the Kindle version (the Kindle app tells me it's page 366): "At the January 2000 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh operating system, OSX, which used some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT three years earlier. It was fitting, and not entirely coincidental, that he was willing to incorporate himself back at Apple at the same moment as the NeXT OS was incorporated into Apple’s. Avie Tevanian had taken the UNIX-related Mach kernel of the NeXT operating system and turned it into the Mac OS kernel, known as Darwin. It offered protected memory, advanced networking, and preemptive multitasking. It was precisely what the Macintosh needed, and it would be the foundation of the Mac OS henceforth. Some critics, including Bill Gates, noted that Apple ended up not adopting the entire NeXT operating system. There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap into a completely new system but instead to evolve the existing one. Application software written for the old Macintosh system was generally compatible with or easy to port to the new one, and a Mac user who upgraded would notice a lot of new features but not a whole new interface." Reading that, it seems to me he got it right, except for misspelling "OS X".

pwthornton 15y ago
No, there is more than that. I don't have the Kindle version, so I can't easily search through the book. But he talks a bit about Avie Tevanian and that essentially that is what NeXT gave Apple. If I get some more time, I'll try to find the exact passage, but it's different from the one you are citing. I'm fine with that one.
- tghw 15y ago
  Updated with the entire quote. He seems to have a decent handle on it there.
  - jonhendry 15y ago
    I disagree. They kept just about all of NeXTSTEP, apart from the UI (but keeping browsers in the Finder, etc) and Display Postscript. They kept the Mach stuff. They kept the Unix stuff. They kept Terminal.app so you could access the Unix stuff. They kept the Cocoa frameworks, Project Builder, and Interface Builder. They retained applications as file packages. They retained file extensions in favor of app/creator codes. They replaced interpreted DPS with Quartz. They changed the menu bar from floating tear-offs to a single menubar. They got rid of the Shelf on Finder windows. What did they not use from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep that was of any significance? About all I can think of is YellowBox on Windows.

vacri 15y ago

OSX vs OS X is an editorial failure. Unless Isaacson self-published the book and let no-one view it beforehand, of course.

azov 15y ago
OS X is technically correct, but it's 202M hits on Google for OS X vs 82M for OSX. As far as I'm concerned both are widely used by technical and non-technical people and mean the same thing. It's a tiny mistake that could be fixed in one second, why are we even mentioning it in the context of Isaacson allegedly blewing the biography?
- vaporstun 15y ago
  A Google search is hardly the way to resolve that. OS X searches for anything with OS or X whereas OSX only searches for things with OSX so of course the former has more hits. I mean you're right that it's technically "OS X", but your methodology for proof is flawed.
  - vacri 15y ago
    a search for: os x does what you say, but a search for "os x" does what the GP says, and matches with the numbers cited, too.

thought_alarm 15y ago

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.

pwthornton 15y ago
I disagree. If Isaacson can't get these details right, which other details are wrong? And if he doesn't know the facts, does he know the right questions to ask? I'd argue that because Isaacson doesn't understand OS X and how much different it is than OS 9, he doesn't understand how important it is to the company. Without OS X, there is no iOS. I'm not asking him to write a technical book, but I do feel that if he understood some of these points better, he might have asked Jobs about them and pushed him more on these topics. The end of life stuff is certainly interesting. I do wish on that front as well that he would have asked more questions of professionals about whether or not it would have made a difference if Steve Jobs didn't act like Steve Jobs. It's sort of implied that Steve's diet (and at times lack thereof) may have inhibited his ability to fight the cancer. Isaacson doesn't really push Steve on this or consult with professionals on it either.
msbarnett 15y ago
> 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.

leoh 15y ago

While Jobs didn't have any direct control over the biography, he did spend hundreds of hours with Isaacson and certainly would have mentioned things that he would have wanted in the book, technical and otherwise; and Isaacson certainly would have included more technical details if Jobs had mentioned them over and again during interviews. The fact of the matter is, though, that the nitty-gritty technical details are just not part of the picture for Jobs. Jobs picked at tiny details only when designers and engineers did something wrong or did something didn't lend itself to Jobs' greater artistic vision. If you're interested in exceptional technical detail, Jobs just would not have been your man. And let's face it, if you're interested in the technology. there will be dozens of engineers and a limitless number of other writers that can write about those matters later. Gross technical detail is just not seeing the forest for the trees; and if you don't realize that fact, then you are someone that would have probably have been met with Jobs' scorn.

ssharp 15y ago

The title of the book is "Steve Jobs", not "Apple". I think Isaacson did a good enough job of capturing Steve Jobs the person. Missing some technical details about Apple isn't a huge deal to me. I already know them and if I didn't, I don't think I'd care. I was much more interested in getting some perspective on Jobs the person, how he acted, how he thought, and why he behaved like he did, not some rehashing of resent technical history that is already well known. Much like Apple's products, this book was created for the masses, not the engineers.