22 ms·

Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’

• huggyface 15y ago
  It surprises how so many simply disbelieve what Isaacson has written because, in their heart of hearts, they can't believe it's true. Denial, or do they actually have personal insight into Jobs? There has been a lot of vilification of Isaacson's book, much of it seeming to draw ire because it presents Jobs as a mere human.
  • twoodfin 15y ago
    I'm not sure what part of Gruber's article you're responding to.
    • huggyface 15y ago
      The entire article is Gruber hand-picking Jobs quotes that serve his vision of Jobs, and discounting the quotes that Isaacson picked -- or holding them as misunderstandings/misinterpretations -- because they don't conform with Gruber's opinion. Gruber has commented on Isaacson's book numerous times with incredible disdain (because, Gruber thinks, it misrepresents Jobs), so this is just a continuation of that theme.
      • reidmain 15y ago
        Gruber makes multiple references to Jobs' faults in that article. He is simply shredding the quotes that Issacson used without actually thinking about what they meant or checking the facts. What about this article do you think is Gruber twisting Issacson's words?. Every example has a well documented reason on why Issacson is flat out wrong.
        • huggyface 15y ago
          Did we read the same article? Where does Gruber "shred" anything? Bill Gates says that "Instead the purchase ended up bringing in Avie Tevanian, who could help the existing Apple operating system evolve so that it eventually incorporated the kernel of the NeXT technology.", and Gruber says "Mac OS X 10.0 was a hybrid of Mac and NeXT technology, but it was clearly the NeXT system with Mac technologies integrated, not the other way around." What Bill Gates said was absolutely true! Rhapsody with the NeXT Mach kernel, a pulled-in, non-NeXT BSD application layer, and then various other Mac layers (GUI, Cocoa, etc). Technically there is nothing wrong with his statement. But it doesn't sound as impressive to Steve Jobs to say that only the microkernel (which we know is a critical part of a system), so better still to simply claim Gates is the liar?
          • sjwright 15y ago
            > and then various other Mac layers (GUI, Cocoa, etc). Incorrect. The GUI wasn't ported, it was rewritten for OS X. Cocoa's heritage is NeXT to the core. Nothing vaguely resembling Cocoa existed in the classic Mac environment. > a pulled-in, non-NeXT BSD application layer Incorrect. There is little of "BSD" in the Mac OS X environment, save for some FreeBSD userland components, most of which only matter on the command line. The application layer of Mac OS X is Cocoa. (There is also the Carbon application layer which does partially derive from classic Mac, but that existed solely to ease application porting of existing Mac apps. But even Carbon is a hybrid, and was actually back-ported to Mac OS 9.) > Technically there is nothing wrong with his statement. Any Mac OS X software developer will know enough to confidently refute the accuracy of Gates' claims.
            • jonhendry 15y ago
              "There is little of "BSD" in the Mac OS X environment, save for some FreeBSD userland components, most of which only matter on the command line. " The same was true of NeXTStep and OpenStep/Mach. Mach kernel. BSD user land. NeXT GUI.
          • reidmain 15y ago
            I'm curious, have you actually done any Mac or iOS development?
            • huggyface 15y ago
              I'm curious, Have you actually done NeXTStep development?
              • lurch_mojoff 15y ago
                Yes, I have. And I can confidently say that Mac OS X, even today after a decade of evolution and sweeping changes, is clearly a direct descendant of NeXTStep and has little in common with System 7. I'll also reiterate what others said -- there is everything wrong with Gates' statement.
      • twoodfin 15y ago
        But it's not about the quotes at all, except insofar as the quotes that Isaacson chose leave the reader with an impression that is simply wrong. The Bill Gates quote about the NeXT acquisition stuck out for me, too. Are you disagreeing with Gruber's thesis that Isaacson really didn't understand the complementary contributions of software to "design"? Why? I'm typically not a defender of John's, but he seems to me to be on target here.
  • brianwillis 15y ago
    It's pretty clear from the second-to-last paragraph that Gruber understands that Jobs was a fallible human being. The criticisms in this post revolve around Isaacson's handling of technical accuracy, and Isaacson's repeated implication that design and engineering are two adversarial ideas.
    • Volpe 15y ago
      Gruber managed to do that without offering much evidence to the contrary. Do Apple engineers and Designers really work side by side? Or is it just that Apple prioritise design over engineering. So rather than the engineers throwing a brick over the fence and saying "Designers, make it look good" it's designers throwing a sleek brick over the fence and saying "Engineers, make it work." The antennae-gate was a REAL problem, that Apple changed it's design for (in the 4S)... Can we really accept there is no tension in Apple over these things (As Gruber is suggesting)?
      • ugh 15y ago
        But it’s an engineering issue, not a design issue. The iPhone 4 had an external antenna to fit in a larger battery. That’s all engineering.
        • Volpe 15y ago
          Regardless whether it's a design or engineering problem. It is pretty clear evidence there is tension between the teams (design and engineering). Which is the opposite of what Gruber is arguing.
      • jonhendry 15y ago
        "The antennae-gate was a REAL problem, that Apple changed it's design for (in the 4S)" Really? It looks the same.
        • Volpe 15y ago
          Mostly the same, Volume/Silent switch are a little bit higher. And the steel rim now has more breaks in it (which was apparently a cause of the reception problems, when your finger went over the only break)
  • subpixel 15y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. It's hard when you find out that your hero was in many ways a contemptible person. And it's not a noble reaction, but certainly a human one, to go looking for some fault with the source of this news.
  • sjwright 15y ago
    Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Mac OS X (and iOS) history and internals knows that Gates' (and therefore the book's) claim that NeXT technology wasn't the basis of OS X is laughably false. In fact I think Gruber himself continued to understate the role NeXT technology played. Gruber writes: > It is in fact, completely and utterly wrong. > NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”. > Apple did get NeXT’s OS to run on Mac hardware. > Mac OS X 10.0 was a hybrid of Mac and NeXT > technology, but it was clearly the NeXT system > with Mac technologies integrated, not the > other way around. Gruber should have gone further and pointed out that Mac OS X wasn't even a hybrid, but rather the latest iteration of NeXT technology combined with new code that reimplemented the Mac experience. The modest quantity of ported or migrated Mac technology (e.g. the Carbon APIs) existed purely to form a compatibility layer with existing Mac apps, and don't form the basis of any future development path. It would be also fair to say that iOS does not have any legacy "Mac" technology in its stack, and shares its spiritual lineage with NeXT alone.
    • SeanLuke 15y ago
      > The modest quantity of ported or migrated Mac technology (e.g. the Carbon APIs) existed purely to form a compatibility layer with existing Mac apps, and don't form the basis of any future development path. I dunno. Post-Rhapsody, Apple worked hard to unify Carbon and Cocoa to provide a consistent user experience across applications. IIRC, in a surprising number of cases, the way unification was achieved was to make the Cocoa element be little more than a compatibility layer on top of Carbon. For example, I believe the save and open panels, print and page layout panels, and various dialog APIs worked this way. It seems to me that if Carbon was viewed as a dead-end from the get-go, embedding it in many cases under Cocoa was a funny way of demonstrating that. Carbon was a big project, and wasn't modest by any standard. Again IIRC, Apple rewrote the entire Finder in Carbon (and not in Cocoa) in order to test the Carbon library for bugs. Other things came from the Mac while their NeXTSTEP equivalents were abandoned: for example, UFS was blown away and replaced with HFS+. Quicktime was ported, as were 3D facilities and game APIs. NeXT's Soundkit was deprecated in favor of stuff for OS 9. Java, up through 1.3.x at any rate, came from OS 9. I think the font facility, always an ugliness in NeXTSTEP, was replaced with Apple's (including support for OpenType etc.). I think your depiction of this stuff as "modest" is not particularly accurate. So anyway, Isaacson's depiction of OS X as being basically Mac technologies with a little NeXTSTEP kernel is ridiculous. But don't make the same mistake in the other direction.
• scj 15y ago
  The good news is that the story isn't lost yet, even if Steve can't tell it. I am hoping that Avie Tevanian writes a really good memoir. In a perfect world, one on par with Hertzfeld.
  • twoodfin 15y ago
    That would really be something. Sadly, I think there was barely a sufficient market for a deeply geeky coffee table book on the Mac's creation. I'm sure the market for an even more deeply geeky look at the development of a modern microkernel-based OS is even smaller.
• evoxed 15y ago
  Not related to the article, but this is what I had to say to my dad after I lent him my copy: Writing biographies about living people is weird. Writing a biography of someone who asked you to is F*ING weird. Apparently Isaacson's other books are better (though I haven't read them myself) but I'm sure the future holds some better researched if not much less personal bios in the future.
• nhangen 15y ago
  I don't know what I'm more surprised at - Isaacson's piss poor job of doing Jobs' life justice, or that Jobs chose him to write the book. Either way, I walked away very disappointed, ready to never think about the book again.
  • zak_mc_kracken 15y ago
    This is what puzzles me the most about Jobs fans, such as Gruber: they think Jobs is a genius who just can't get anything wrong, except... when he picked the person to write his biography.
    • dawson 15y ago
      Honestly curious, what was wrong with it and how do you think it could of been improved? – I really enjoyed it, though admittedly I'm a complete fanboy.
      • nhangen 15y ago
        I'm a fanboy, but thought the book went far too deeply into personal relationships, lacked objectivity, and diminished Jobs' accomplishments in an effort to make him seem more human.
    • twoodfin 15y ago
      Eh. I agree with the Siracusian critique (echoed by Gruber) that Jobs "picked the wrong guy", at least for us hackers. But I don't think Jobs really gave a damn what Isaacson wrote about what went on under the kimono at Apple. If anything, he'd probably have preferred a biographer who would have left the TV "cracked it" quote on the cutting room floor, lest Samsung know what was about to hit them. He wanted a bio that would help his kids get to know him better, and that's what he got. It's not a coincidence that the most intimate moments in the book all revolve around Jobs outside of Apple. That's what he talked to Isaacson about, and that's what Isaacson put to paper.
      • alabut 15y ago
• 6ren 15y ago
  A nit: Hardware isn't just industrial design. Apple manages to squeeze a lot more performance out of the same components as others, because they do design in an integrated, interdependent way, rather than modular. This gives less flexibility to customize/mix-and-swap, but better performance (for whatever you want to optimize: speed, weight, size, power consumption etc). This was extremely important in the early days of the iPhone, but now that components have improved so dramatically, we are nearing the point where there's performance to spare, and it needn't be optimized. The upshot is that "iOS on an Android" with the same specs wouldn't have performed as well. It would have been less smooth, less responsive etc. So that, at least then, hardware was crucial for the experience. The same was true for the iPod and especially Woz's Apple computer. It's still true for the iPad. I believe it will be true for Apple's next product category, because (hopefully) they'll continue to move to the edge of what is possible - where optimization is absolutely essential to be the first to get over that edge. tl;dr hardware matters.
  • drivebyacct2 15y ago
    Can you give more technical details, I don't really understand at all how iOS would run worse on a similarly spec'd phone? I can understand how hardware component design would affect the physical build, but I don't see how it makes the processor or memory faster.
    • reidmain 15y ago
      It would not run worse. The stuttering nature of Android is because of the software architecture decisions that were made early in development. The same is true with iOS. iOS places much higher priority on rendering and handling user input which is why it always appears so smooth.
      • drivebyacct2 15y ago
        That theory was debunked by members of the Android team shortly after that G+ post made its way around the internet. It has more to do with the number of drawable contexts and the limitations (still) of how they're handled in mobile processors.
• drivebyacct2 15y ago
  Interesting, I couldn't have disagreed more with the initial choice. I love Linux and appreciate Android, but I drool over iPhone 4/4s and I love my MBP. I'm surprised that people still fawn over OS X as much as they do, frankly. Especially as it becomes increasingly annoying to use as a development machine (at least personally).
  • Steko 15y ago
    I also "drooled over the 4" for quite awhile waiting but when I got the 4S I found it didn't take me long to recall Edward Tufte's words: "the elegant sharp edges that encase many touchscreens require users to desensitize their hands in order to ignore the physical discomfort produced by the aggressive edges. Last year in Cupertino, I yelled at some people about touchscreens that paid precise attention to finger touches from the user but not to how the device in turn touches the hands of the user (and produces divot edge-lines in the flesh)." http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003qM&topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... It took me at least a full week to get my hand acclimated to the 4S edges.
    • cma 15y ago
      It lets the phone stand on edge for facetime; the htc solution would have been a kickstand, adding tons of size and weight.
      • cheald 15y ago
        It seems like a terrible design choice to make the product uncomfortable to use in the common case to accommodate a single far less common use case.
      • drivebyacct2 15y ago
        What do you have around you that rests at eye level that you can set an iphone on? It's not like the camera aims up or anyone wants to FaceTime with my belly.
      • Steko 15y ago
• kleiba 15y ago
  I know quite a few people who run Windows on MacBooks as their primary OS. Of course, the different mac clones that run the OS on generic hardware were pretty successful too (before being shut down by Apple's legal department).
• martythemaniak 15y ago
  It's hard to dispute the excellent hardware Apple makes, but quite easy to do that to their software. My MBP dual-boots into Ubuntu so I can actually do my work and the 4S would make a great Android phone, though it still wouldn't be my choice due to its small screen. What it really comes down to is that their software is too opinionated. At every turn I get frustrated by one inanity or another until I give up and just use something that works without requiring mental contortions on my part.
  • jshen 15y ago
    I feel the opposite. One example, when I use Linux I'm immediately met with the contortion of ctr-c/v/x not working as copy/paste across the board. Most notably in the terminal. Cmd-c/v/x works across the board.
    • pyre 15y ago
      This is just a side-effect of Apple using a non-standard modifier key. I don't think that the CMD modifier was chosen so that it wouldn't collide with the use of ctrl- sequences in terminal emulators.
      • mbreese 15y ago
        Not quite... it's a side effect of Apple's Interface Guidelines. In Linux, there are a few different sets of guidelines (if you're lucky), so God only knows what was in the mind of the developer at the time they worked on a GUI. To top it off, most Mac devs think a lot about the design of the GUI and concentrate on human/device interaction. A Linux dev is more likely to be focused on just getting the damn thing to work. (There's merit in both approaches)
        • ralphsaunders 15y ago
          There really isn't. Getting the thing to work is the bare minimum.
        • ZeroGravitas 15y ago
• redthrowaway 15y ago
  Interesting, but as a software guy I disagree entirely on the hardware/software side. I'd much rather have a 4s running ICS than one of the others running iOS, and I'd much rather have my MBP run Linux than even OSX (stupid EFI...). Granted, I have different tastes and needs than most, but I view Apple products not as the OS "in a pretty box", as Jobs put it, but rather as a pretty box with a good-not-great OS in it.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • prawn 15y ago
    Same. I'd rather have a MBP running Win XP even. In fact, I have an 8-10 year old Dell laptop and a MBP bought within the last year or two. I planned to make the switch but I've kept using the old Dell and the MBP sits at home as a net-browsing machine for my wife.
  • Steko 15y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but you're not disagreeing the conclusion that software is more important, you're just arguing the details as to which software is superior. If I could mix and match here is what I'd take: Software: iOS Hardware: Nokia Customer Service: Apple Ecosystem: Amazon Carrier: none of the above (the US sucks so bad...)
    • redthrowaway 15y ago
      That's basically right. Apple makes fantastic hardware. None of the other manufacturers come close on design and execution. As far as software goes, I'm more concerned about what I can do with it than the polish. I'm curious as to why you would prefer a Nokia handset to an Apple one. I've found their designs to be uninspiring.
      • cheald 15y ago
        If I had to guess, it's because Nokia's hardware could generally survive a nuclear explosion at ground zero and emerge unscathed.
• Steko 15y ago
  I think it bears mention here that Isaacson has acknowledged there may be some places the book could be improved in and may be putting out a version 2 soon (or maybe 1S? I'll show myself out...). The whole thing was a bit rushed to press.
  • gojomo 15y ago
    Indeed – the original target publication date was March 2012. It was rushed to completion as Jobs' health worsened, leaving a lot of loose ends.
• michaelpinto 15y ago
  In retrospect the biggest problem I had with Isaacson’s book was that he really seemed to dumb down his subject. I realize that Isaacson may have had to do this to appeal to a non-tech audience and to fit an entire complex lifespan into one book — but the result is that Jobs becomes a flat cartoon character of sorts and everything becomes oversimplified. And maybe that's what Joe and Jill Average want to read -- but as a fanboy and geek it left me feeling a bit empty and uninspired.
• nirvana 15y ago
  I'm critical of John Gruber on many topics, but in this essay he is exactly right. Further, there are many examples, just like the Bill Gates one, where Jobs says something that is true[1] and Isaacson assumes its the "reality distortion field" and then quotes someone else, like gates, who has an agenda, telling a lie as "proof" that Jobs is lying. Lets talk about this "Reality Distortion Field". People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma. Is anyone here willing to admit to being swindled in this way? I am not. I am not aware of Jobs ever saying something that was actually false (though I'm quite aware of many manifold lies told about Jobs.) For instance, remember the introduction of the iPhone? How about the introduction of the iPad? Everyone here should be old enough to remember one or both of these keynotes. Surely Jobs "Reality Distortion Field" would be deployed to maximum effect at such keynotes-- and after both of them I remember much derision and claims that Jobs had the RDF on maximum and how those products were going to be complete failures, and how everyone needed a keyboard on their phones and how the iPad was a terrible, terrible name, inspired by female hygiene products, etc. etc. IF you go back and watch these, can you find a single lie? Can you find any reality that was distorted? Sure, Steve Jobs called the iPhone revolutionary. That's obviously a characterization based on an opinion, but that opinions seems to have held up-- before it, there were only feature phones, really, and now every phone that isn't an iPhone is some sort of iPhone counterfeit (e.g.: has a touch screen) It clearly revolutionized the phone category, and created the app ecosystem. Similar things happened with the iPad. Because Apple is successful, and because Apple does things its own way, people feel the need to attack Apple. And of course, they attack Jobs. Most of these attacks have clear motivations-- people who bought another product who want to feel it is superior, or people who work for a competitor, or -- and this is the biggest source, I believe-- hack journalists who want to create a sensational story (I still remember a claim that Apple switched from ATI to NVIDIA chips in laptops the week before they were announced because of a leak from ATI... as if Apple could even do that so quickly for a product that was about to ship.... but people believe it. The story was "Steve got really mad and now the new MacBooks will ship with NVIDIA chips!" I know for a fact this is false because you can't change production that fast... but people believe those kinds of lies. After all, they've been told for year that Steve Jobs is an asshole, and, despite never showing this side of himself in public, they believe it. [1] True because I know it to be true either because I witnessed it, or I'm more informed on the issue than Isaacson is. I've been an Apple watcher for 20 years, and I have noticed that much of what people believe about Apple is based on oft repeated myth without substantiation in fact. I remember Apple trivia fairly well, and the specifics of things that often happened before people writing about them now were out of grade school. (EG: Just this weekend I read in "Inside Apple" the long refuted claim that Apple "stole" Xerox technology for the Mac. Amazing kind of a theft that was-- Apple paid for a license to use that technology with stock which, if held to present, is worth Billions of dollars. Quite the heist!) Another example: for quite a time there, many windows fans believed that Bill Gates owned Apple, because to them $150M is a big "investment" and they think Microsoft bought Apple in 1997. (they didn't know that Apple had a lot more of that in cash already, and that part of the deal-- the bigger part-- was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)
• gojomo 15y ago
  Even the original iPod, which wasn’t based on NeXT technology, used the column-view concept for hierarchical navigation that NeXT pioneered. Those are called Miller Columns, and NeXT popularized them, but they were pioneered much earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns
• ynniv 15y ago
  I am disappointed with Gruber's "shades of grey" conclusion. He is of course right that there are good parts as well as bad parts. Maybe I am too "Jobsian", but that equates total crap to me. The abysmal failures of the book leave room for someone else to write the definitive biography. Isaacson had his chance but he blew it. He sold a lot of copies, but the people who misunderstood Jobs won't be the ones spending their time telling the next generation about him. A hundred years from now, the book that people quote regarding Jobs will certainly be written by someone who properly understood the man. Someone who writes that "greatest book ever". This superlative attitude might seem overblown in everyday life, but it's what society values. Second place is in the end the first loser (or at least the first forgotten). And hat author could be one of us. It can only be someone with the perspective to set it straight. It certainly won't be a writer thinking more about himself than his subject. In history, perspective matters more than profession.
  • panacea 15y ago
    I don't think there are such things as 'the definitive biography/history/story'. All such endeavours are filtered tellings of actual fact through prisms of bias, limited knowledge and the limitations of condensation.
    • ynniv 15y ago
      There is a limited amount of attention that we pay to events of the past. Eventually one of them wins, and the others are mentioned only when the first one is notably wrong. There will be other biographies written, and at least one of them will be better than this one.
• gojomo 15y ago
  Isaacson leaving those Gates quotes unremarked upon doesn't imply agreement; he's just relaying interesting details. For example, the post-NeXT acquisition rant, which comes by way of Amelio, is effectively refuted by the whole life story that follows. So there's no need to spoon-feed a conclusion to the reader: "look how wrong Gates was!" Everyone gets it just about as well as Gruber does.
  • gnaffle 15y ago
    It does imply agreement if it's the only viewpoint being presented. When he says that OSX used "some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT", that's not a quote from anyone, it's still wrong (or grossly misleading at best, when the main reason to buy NeXT was to get the operating system). He could have asked anyone familiar with the topic, and he would have gotten the correct answer, which is that OSX is a direct descendant of NeXTStep.
    • gojomo 15y ago
      It does imply agreement if it's the only viewpoint being presented. Not at all; the entire rest of the book demonstrates the truth more richly than any sort of immediate-pairing-with-an-alternate-take would. It's not a compact newspaper story or a children's textbook: take it as a whole. Does it demonstrate the truth of Gates' quotes? Clearly not. Even where Gates says, "let’s be frank, the NeXT OS was never really used", I don't see that as being presented as gospel by Isaacoson. It's just another accurately quoted viewpoint. (The presence of puffery like "let's be frank" and weasel words like "really" are clues to any reader that this assessment is very perspective-dependent.) Gruber is probably right that Isaacson doesn't quite appreciate software or NeXT's technologies. I think Gruber was also right to refute the Gladwell 'tweaker' label, interpreted from Isaacson's work. But Gruber is wrong that leaving Gates' quotes dangling at the end of "this section of the chapter, with no additional commentary" leaves the average reader "to believe that the above is an accurate description of Apple’s NeXT acquisition." The average reader knows it's just an accurate quote of Gates' opinion, to be interpreted along with all the other info in the book, before and after.
      • 15y ago
• tatsuke95 15y ago
  >What computer would you rather use? A MacBook running Windows 7, or, say, a Lenovo ThinkPad running Mac OS X 10.7? Being as how I run a Macbook Air with Windows 7, and don't even remember what OSX looks like, my answer is pretty obvious. I've never used a laptop that feels as good (the touchpad is the best). But Apple software? Meh.
  • ImprovedSilence 15y ago
    My thoughts exactly after reading those first paragraphs. My ideal setup is MacbookAir, gorgeous hardware/ascetic design, Linux for teh business end.
    • pbreit 15y ago
      Do you guys think this is a common feeling? I don't.
      • ImprovedSilence 15y ago
        No, maybe not exactly. But keep in mind, we here in the tech world, I think, (or this is just coming from my experiences) pretty much concede that Apple wins the design award. I have several non-tech friends whom still love windows, and are all about windows 7. I know people who are thinking about switching to a mac, and but are afraid of not knowing what the hell is going on. (I was honestly concerned at first) I guess what I'm trying to say is, that other Software out there has a huge huge presence, with non-techie people, who are tempted by Apple only because of the "ooo shiny" effect of their slim devices, backlit keyboards, and the fanboism surrounding them. That's decidedly the hardware that is converting people. Windows users are more than happy to just use windows forever. Until their devices don't look as pretty as the guys next to them in the coffee shop. (results may be different for mobile, but only because I think Android hasn't got it's act together with it's vendors yet. Some aspects of the biz take longer to sort out than technical development, unfortunately)
  • tomflack 15y ago
    I hate to go off-topic, but you don't have any contact info in your profile... what's your typical battery life like with that set-up? I was under the impression 5ish hours on the 13" but The Verge said 4 this week... made me re-think adopting the win7/MBA setup.
• CamperBob 15y ago
  Gruber: But “Design is how it works” is a much better statement of Apple’s philosophy Nope. Function is how it works. Design is what it is. Jobs got that, whatever else anyone can say about him.
  • simonh 15y ago
    That was a quote from Steve Jobs himself.
• barrkel 15y ago
  The rhetorical questions at the start of this article were easy for me too - but surprisingly, they were the complete opposite of Gruber's. I primarily run Windows 7 on my MBA.
• phzbOx 15y ago
  I've got a macbook running arch, couldn't be happier.
  • milfot 15y ago
    I failed the thought experiment too..
• dkarl 15y ago
  What computer would you rather use? A MacBook running Windows 7, or, say, a Lenovo ThinkPad running Mac OS X 10.7? Gruber, like everyone else, knows that the ThinkPad is a legendary design and that there are many people who prefer it over everything else. Picking it to serve as his example of inferior hardware was his signal that only true Mac fans should read on, so I didn't. Kudos to him for letting me know up front that the rest of the article wasn't my cup of tea. Wouldn't it be nice if my MacBook Pro wasn't... didn't... was less... I'll spare you the complaints, and the praise for the ThinkPad T-series. They could both learn from each other. I realize it's a matter of opinion which piece of hardware is superior. That's the point. Gruber threw up a billboard in paragraph four that says, if you think it's at all unclear that the MacBook Pro is the greatest laptop design of all time, read no further. If even he doesn't think this bit of hagiography ought to be read by a broader audience, who are we to contradict him and post it to a broader audience on HN?
  • benatkin 15y ago
    I think you misinterpreted it. The ThinkPad was grouped along with "top-of-the-line HTC, Samsung, or Nokia handset running iOS 5" as being the best non-Apple hardware. I think it was a compliment to the ThinkPad that he didn't enumerate any other PC laptops like he did with phones.
  • siglesias 15y ago
    The point is that we, he, and Jobs would pick our preferred software on an inferior hardware device over our preferred hardware running inferior software, not the particulars of the choice.
    • redthrowaway 15y ago
      In an ideal (or even sane) world, we wouldn't have to pick. We'd just run the software we want on the hardware we want.
      • Poiesis 15y ago
        Perhaps. But that flexibility is a tradeoff. That's the point here. The reason the pieces fit so well together is that they were designed to fit each other without regard for compability with a larger ecosystem (I'm being deliberately vague here whether I'm talking about the relationship of hardware to its case, or software to hardware, or subsystems to each other). If you want flexibility then you have to accept some wiggle room in how the pieces work.
• weegee 15y ago
  what a waste of time to read. I read the book, just like the author did, and every single book out there has typographical errors and mistakes. so does this one. who. fucking. cares. and Isaacson didn't need to tell us how wrong Gates was when he criticized the purchase of NeXT by Apple, because it is fucking obvious and Isaacson rightly didn't feel the need to point out the obvious in his book, much to his credit.
• tjmc 15y ago
  tl;dr Gruber's still pissed he didn't get the official biographer gig.
• SeoxyS 15y ago
  I've read the book in its entirety, and while I don't refute the inaccuracies on some of the technical details covered, I don't really this it's all that important. As a reader, I was not interested in the technology aspect and technical details: that is already well documented. If this is what you're looking for as a reader, then this is not the book for you. Isaacson was the perfect writer for this biography, in my opinion, thanks to his lack of technical knowledge. When you know the technology, it's easy to get lost in the things that don't matter. Isaacson has a fresh and often more objective perspective than any tech writer could. The details surrounding which kernel was used in Mac OS X and how much NeXT was responsible for really does not bring much value to me as a reader. Like I said, if I cared deeply about this, it's well documented already and easy to get from other sources. What I got out of the book was a remarkably intimate look at the man himself: What made him tick, what his philosophies were, what the politics were and what the major obstacles were that he had to overcome. All of this, wrapped in an enthralling narrative and surprisingly intimate detail. Isaacson may not have understood the technology, but he definitely understood Jobs' humanity, or sometimes lack thereof.
  • icarus_drowning 15y ago
    This strikes me as a bit hand-wavey. ("Don't pay attention to the glaring technical inaccuracies that have somehow made it into the "official" biography of a technical icon, focus on the human story). It is certainly possible that Isaacson got the "human" side right, but when you're talking about a human who's iconic achievements are inseparable from the technologies he created, that's a pretty weak defense.
  • gnaffle 15y ago
    But why couldn't we have had _both_? The technological history of Apple post Steves return is very poorly documented due to its secretive nature. Even so, Isaacson did a really poor job of analyzing Steves personality, and never really confronts him about it. The closest we really get is Steve saying "well, that's just who I am", and a theory by Ive (or Hertzfeld?) about Steves motivations for being so cruel at times. Couldn't Isaacson have confronted Steve about this theory? How about asking him how this fits in with his relation to Buddhism? Or maybe that would be too technical..? Isacsson said that the book "wrote itself". As someone else pointed out, books rarely make good authors.
• klausa 15y ago
  I don't have any particular feeling toward Gruber's work, but (apart for odd timing.) I really liked this piece. But I had this nagging 'hey, I read that before!' feeling back in my head - and I was right, although I heard similar complaints before - voiced by John Siracusa (you know the guy that writes 10+ pages reviews of new versions of OS X on Ars Technica? That's him.) on his 'Hypercritical' podcast.[1] It's long (1h15m, and it's only the first part.), but in my opinion absolutely worth listening to. If you have free time, or have nothing to listen to while commuting - give this one a shot. [1] http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42
  • jmelloy 15y ago
    Both the Hypercritical and the Talk Show around that time had in-depth discussions around the book; I believe Gruber started iwth "I mostly agree with Siracusa." I was also a little surprised by the timing of this piece, because I also felt like I'd seen/heard some of it before -- but I realize the audience for DF is bigger than the audience for the Talk Show & Hypercritical, so it makes sense & is well sourced.
• RockyMcNuts 15y ago
  Using a howitzer to kill a flea. Isaacson writes fluidly, put in the research and reporting (also rehashed a lot of other people's), but doesn't know the technology or the tech business. In fact I don't get a sense he likes them or 'got' Steve Jobs. Hatchet job might be strong. But he dwells a lot on the charismatic and narcissistic and mercurial personality and not on why so many great people loved Jobs and worked so hard for him. Or what his insights about products and the business were (besides being a control freak and perfectionist). The book is a good read, it's a creditable first draft of history, contains some first-hand stuff I never saw before about the genesis of the iPod and iPhone and iPad. Isaacson gives the who, what, when, where, but doesn't really explain why. To his credit, he lets the people speak for themselves. Jobs could have picked a lot of other people, but he picked a non-tech, non-business writer. I guess he wanted someone to just tell the story, not the strategy or product vision that makes Apple great. Maybe Gruber should interview a bunch of people and give it a shot. It's not what Isaacson set out for or was in a position to do.
  • pooriaazimi 15y ago
    > Isaacson gives the who, what, when, where, but doesn't really explain why. Most of the time. But sometimes he tries to explain and fails miserably. It wasn't a newspaper article, it was a book that everyone knew would sell tens of millions of copies (even if the subject hasn't died a few weeks before). If he had sought council of one Apple observer (about his explanations, and whether they were right or catastrophically wrong) before wrapping up the book and sending it to the publisher, the book wouldn't be such a mess. > Jobs could have picked a lot of other people, but he picked a non-tech, non-business writer. I guess he wanted someone to just tell the story, not the strategy or product vision that makes Apple great. Or, as John Siracusa said, he might've chosen the wrong guy.
  • smackfu 15y ago
    The only person who could really answer the Why was Jobs himself, and even though this was an authorized bio, I never really felt that there was much personal insight from Jobs himself. Did Isaacson really not ask the questions, or did Jobs not know the answers himself?
• buff-a 15y ago
  What computer would you rather use? A MacBook running Windows 7, or, say, a Lenovo ThinkPad running Mac OS X 10.7? I'd take the ThinkPad running 10.6 thanks. 10.7 is a total clusterfuck. It pisses me off (a seasoned developer) and it confuses the fuck out of my wife (who isn't).
• msg 15y ago
  Dave Winer called from three months ago... http://scripting.com/stories/2011/10/27/theJobsBook.html http://scripting.com/stories/2011/10/27/theJobsBook.html http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/21/whyJobsChoseIsaacson.html http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/21/whyJobsChoseIsaacson...
• doron 15y ago
  I am probably a very small minority in this regard, but in this , for me, and to grubers point, it's the hardware not the software. The hardware is an aesthetic superior design. But I run windows 7 on it. I find windows 7 to be a far superior user experience to osx, faster, and at least on this hardware more stable. Apple provides the easiest driver install procedure for windows then any other provider, I just find osx itself... Rather primitive, most likely imo due to the insistence of Apple on providing a hermetic user experience. No tech company, no matter how smart, has all the answers in one box.
• throwawaysnipe 15y ago
  A biography is not a hagiography. If Gruber wants the latter, he can write one. He already has a lot of material for it.
• mkramlich 15y ago
  I loved Isaacson's book but I think Gruber is right.
• pooriaazimi 15y ago
  If you liked this piece (and didn't like Isaacson's book at all), don't miss John Siracusa's great critic of the book - Hypercritical, episodes 42 and 43. Well worths listening to... http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 (about 18 minutes into) http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/43 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/43
• eyko 15y ago
  This whole "what do you think Steve Jobs would have done" is beginning to look a lot like a "What Would Jesus Do" kind of following. I get it that he was a visionary but come on…
• sceptre 15y ago
  Guys.. really... Does this post really warrant 150 comments... Who cares? Gruber is making a living as a "fanboi", and no wonder he is getting worked up over some biography.. Jobs and Gates are legends and they have left their mark on history.. What have you guys done so far???
• padobson 15y ago
  I had two problems with this post. First: 'NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”.' It was, and so was Mac OSX. What Gruber doesn't seem to get is that warmed over unix provides a much more stable OS than Windows NT or DOS. He should be proudly admitting its warmed over unix. Second: "It’s almost impossible to overstate just how wrong Bill Gates is here, but Isaacson presents Gates’s side as the truth." It should be mentioned more clearly that Gates was saying this on a sales call - his ultimate goal being to have every consumer computer made running Windows NT. If he stretched the truth a bit, he shouldn't be blamed for being ignorant, only ambitious. This is what often irks me about Gruber - he makes disagreeing with Apple out to be an act of incompetence. Most engineers that don't like Apple products simply want greater customization over their tech, something Apple denies their users to promote ease of use.
  • gnaffle 15y ago
    It wasn't, unless you're completely ignoring the one thing that made OSX and NeXTStep unique, the OpenSTEP framework and Display Postscript/PDF GUI engine. That they were able to use these components made it possible to provide an operating system with a nice, well performing GUI running on a stable UNIX foundation. Had NeXTStep only been a warmed over UNIX, wouldn't it have been better for Apple to just use Linux and X11, or even better use A/UX which already had a Mac-like interface? Gruber is not really blaming Gates, he's blaming Isaacson for not doing proper research. He could have literally asked anyone for more information about this, and the answers he would have gotten would have provided more insight into what really happened and why Apple succeeded. It enabled Apple to have OSX running on Intel from day one, and it made launching the iPhone and iPad possible without reinventing the wheel (which is what Nokia, Microsoft, RIM and Palm all had to do in response to the iPhone).
    • sauravc 15y ago
      So is Ubuntu a new OS since it has it's own window manager?
      • gnaffle 15y ago
• rbanffy 15y ago
  Allow me to disagree. Apple is a systems company. They, of course, use software and hardware, but those are made to match each other. It's also Jobs' company - and it is what NeXT was probably meant to be. If software were the only priority, OSX (and iOS) would be more modular, easily customizable and extensible - and it would be much more advanced than it is and than what its Unix roots allow it to be. And it would run on PCs since the 286 days (maybe with a decent graphics board). If hardware were the priority, they would have designed their own CPUs, embedded memory management functionality within the memory itself. By now, you would probably be able to SHA1 a block of memory without it ever touching the CPU data bus. Much like a glass cockpit of a plane or your in-car entertainment system, you don't care what OS it runs or what types of CPUs are built into it. A Mac, an iP*d or an iPhone are devices you buy to cover a specific need - you want to write, crunch numbers, make phone calls, read books, listen to music, even write software... Of course, Macs are more flexible and allow a lot of customization, but it only goes that far. If you boot a Mac with Linux or Windows, is it still a Mac? Hasn't it lost something in the process? If you install OSX on an HP Envy, is it a Mac? Jobs was a very flawed person, but he also saw differently, and did a lot of amazing things less flawed people failed at.
  • revscat 15y ago
    > If software were the only priority, OSX (and iOS) would be more modular, easily customizable and extensible - and it would be much more advanced than it is and than what its Unix roots allow it to be. OS X is very customizable, and you mention the proof of this yourself: iOS. Apple was able to take the fundamentals of OS X and, within a few years, maintain it, and move code between iOS back into OS X. I don't think the evidence supports your premise, here. > And it would run on PCs since the 286 days (maybe with a decent graphics board). NextStep did run on Intel processors, from the get-go.[1] > If hardware were the priority, they would have designed their own CPUs, Starting with the iPhone 4, Apple did just this with their A5 chip. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhhFQ-3w5tE#t=15m http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhhFQ-3w5tE#t=15m
    • rbanffy 15y ago
      > OS X is very customizable Only if you are Apple. > NextStep did run on Intel processors, from the get-go. No. It ran originally on Motorola 68K processors (030 and 040) on NeXT's own hardware. It was then ported to other platforms. > Starting with the iPhone 4, Apple did just this with their A5 chip. But Macs ran PowerPCs (which were heavily influenced by Apple) and switched to commodity Intel processors. Apple did, for some time, design its own exotic hardware, but didn't went much beyond rendering expansion very difficult.
• dasil003 15y ago
  I love this: > But, as a thought experiment, which is more important to you? What phone would you rather carry? An iPhone 4S modified to run Android or Windows Phone 7? Or a top-of-the-line HTC, Samsung, or Nokia handset running iOS 5? This is a fascinating question to me because though I agree with Gruber on preferring OS X on the PC hardware (for now anyway, at least vs Windows rather than Linux), I think I actually would prefer Android on an iPhone. My biggest gripe with Android is the shitty hardware and the seeming inability of any manufacturer to make a touch-screen that is not glitchy as fuck all. When it comes to software I concede iOS has more polish and there tend to be better designed apps. But on the other hand, Android has the more powerful apps. For instance, I use DoggCatcher for podcasts on android, and I've tried a half-dozen iOS podcast apps, many of which are more elegant, but they are extremely under powered feature-wise. Apple's philosophy of only have a home button is elegant serves discoverability, but I don't think it's inherently better, and for power users I think it can be a disadvantage.
• ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  As I read it Gates is defending his statement that buying NeXT was stupid given the known facts at the time the deal was done. He does so by downplaying the NeXT software lineage in Mac OS X, but also by claiming that the real gem they got from NeXT was Steve Jobs, who Amelio couldn't have known would go on to be a great CEO, because he was well known at the time to be a maniac. It seems like something Gruber would agree with if phrased slightly differently (e.g. "the most important thing Apple got from NeXT was Steve Jobs") so I don't know why he's getting so bent out of shape about a quote from another book which Bill Gates himself immediately questions the truth of in the the Jobs bio. (And is it just me or is it a stretch to attribute the iPod interface to NeXT? Choosing an item from a list and going to a sublist isn't something I remember them inventing.)
  • tjogin 15y ago
    He doesn't have a problem with Gates's statement, he has a problem with Isaacson's lack of research. Gates didn't write the book, Isaacson did. This is just one example where Jobs says something true, Isaacson thinks he's lying and instead trusts someone else who are either lying, or don't know the truth.
    • ZeroGravitas 15y ago
      Who is Isaacson trusting? Bill Gates? If so why publish text that Gates disagrees with the truth of. Amelio? If so why publish the fact that Gates disputes that version? It sounds like he doesn't really "trust" either account, and why should he? Gruber presents this as the best example of Issacson not trusting something true Jobs said and "trusting" the lies of others (as do you) but really it's just nerdy nitpicking about how far you should emphasise and editorialise the subjectivity of 3rd party accounts, there's no quote from Jobs being disproved in this example it's just Amelio (who in the anecdote just picked NeXT over NT!) describing Gates angry reaction at the time and Gates commenting about it later. Gruber's reaction is a total non-sequitur. He can't cope with an angry outburst by a rival that's just lost a business deal being left unchallenged, when the context is clear.
• tjogin 15y ago
  I agree with Gruber, but I'd like to add that these are not small errors on Walter Isaacson's part. They're huge errors. The biggest errors any biography author could make about Steve Jobs. Why? Why are we even interested in reading a biography about Steve Jobs to begin with? Because he was a narcissistic asshole? Really? Because that's the part Isaacson nailed. There are plenty of assholes, and that characteristic alone does not make for a best-selling biography. No, the reason anyone is interested in reading Steve Jobs's biography is because of his work. And yet, Steve's work is the part Isaacson doesn't get. Isaacson falls into the same traps that the media does with regularity; thinking Apple's design obsession is about veneer, thinking it's about marketing, about fooling people, about lying. It's not, that might sell a few products, but it does not sell record quantities of products and achieve top customer satisfaction. You'd think a person with full access to Steve Jobs and people close to him would be able to at the very least ask a few questions about what he saw that others could not, that lead to the successes of eg. the iPhone. Recall other industry big wigs laughing it off, from RIM to Nokia to Microsoft. The iPhone was a joke to them. What did Steve see that they did not? What was his thought process? What made Steve Jobs so different for him to be able to upset industry after industry? These are things I'd have wanted to know and I can't help feel a bit sad that now we will never know. Because Isaacson squandered the only chance we got.
  • ZeroGravitas 15y ago
    You shouldn't really get upset at CEOs trash-talking their competitors. It's their job. In fact, it's a compliment. Trash talking something means it's registered as a threat. How many of them trash-talked OpenMoko? (Conversely, what did Jobs trash-talk? Kindle and Android mainly) Ironically enough Gruber is a big fan of taking offense at these entirely predictable comments from CEOs. He's basically trolling himself by taking obvious talking points seriously and trolling his massive readership by continually re-broadcasting these comments that are entirely without merit or interest.
    • tjogin 15y ago
      I'm not even a little bit upset about CEOs trash talking each other. I'm sure Gruber doesn't care either. Not sure what lead you to believe that. Observing something happening and writing about that doesn't mean that it upsets you, or that you like it, or that you dislike it. It only means you find it interesting or telling in some way.
• aremie 15y ago
  Steve Jobs cared about the experience you have when using his products. It has to be simple to use, reliable and look nice. Elegance
• tomkin 15y ago
  After listening to Hypercritical's take [1], I have to agree with Gruber on this one as well. Some of the errors in this book aren't your run-of-the-mill misinterpretations, or lost in translation. They are glaring, fundamental errors regarding how Apple was run as a company, Steve Jobs himself and the people in his life. When you write a book about a technology giant's CEO and you can't even get the name of the company right ("Apple Computers"), you have to wonder what else is wrong. [1] http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42
• jroseattle 15y ago
  I disagree with Gruber's interpretation here. Apple wants to do everything well; excellent software is a by-product. But as a focus? Not really. This is not to say Apple doesn't make good software, but there is very little in the actual output of the company that supports Gruber's notion. Back in early iPhone days, one of the biggest complaints was a lack of multi-tasking in iOS -- you could only ever have one app running at a time. There were no push notifications, etc. The Apple explanation, per Jobs, was that they consciously chose to exclude that capability. A few versions later, voila -- iOS supports multi-tasking. This sort of cycle -- explain why a feature didn't exist due to some chosen policy/belieft, then include it in later revisions -- became a pattern for Apple. Flip to the hardware side, and the story is different. When has Apple hardware, since Jobs return in the nineties, ever been a compromise? It hasn't, because Jobs focused on the hardware. While the software is important, it is really a means to an end. The hardware meets this condition too, but it is much higher in the pecking order of consideration than software.
  • thomasjoulin 15y ago
    well people complained about the lack of 3G, and now LTE. Some also complained about the lack of radio or full bluetooth support. I think your right, Apple wants to do everything well, not just "everything". If they can't do it well (copy pasting, multitasking...) they don't do it until they can. I think we have yet to see the full spectrum of Apple's focus on software. Until the iPhone, they were hardware oriented (the Mac, the iPod). But since then, they are moving towards software. They make some of the best Mac and iOS apps after all.
• Havoc 15y ago
  >Isaacson clearly believes that design is merely how a product looks and feels, and that “engineering” is how it actually works. The author doesn't seem to understand that Isaacson isn't writing for a HN audience. To the vast majority of people "design" does mean only aesthetics, so the author is to some extent justified in following the same route. Same thing with de-emphasis of software. It is pretty much impossible to explain why a certain piece of software is good using words to a non-programmer audience - who may not even have seen an Apple device. I'd have glossed over software too especially since everyone associates Apple with brushed aluminium hardware anyway. Just because some aspect isn't discussed in the book doesn't mean the author is ignorant of it. These types books are meant for mass market entertainment, not a technically literate HN crowd. Of course if you measure the book against the wrong bloody benchmark then it fails miserably. And yet somehow after pages of doing exactly that the author manages to highlight his own mistake in the final 2 sentences: >Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
  • jonhendry 15y ago
    " To the vast majority of people "design" does mean only aesthetics, so the author is to some extent justified in following the same route." If he's writing about Jobs, then it's pretty much inexcusable to fail to put it the way Jobs would, rather than how "the vast majority of people" would.
• untangle 15y ago
  I'm a big fan of Apple's products. Have been since the Apple II. But when I look dispassionately at the core capabilities, I do not see uniform excellence. Apple clearly excels at: marketing/brand, hardware, and partner/supply chain management. But Apple's software quality is all over the map. Further, Apple does not "get" the internet (and never has). Since "hardware vs software" was the focus of JG's post, I'll briefly state my case around those two elements. Apple gets hardware. I doubt that anyone would argue otherwise. Fabulous objects-of-desire emerge from amazing industrial designs. I can't even think of a laptop I'd consider in the same league as the Air. Ditto the iPad, iPod, and Airport. (The iPhone is in a much closer race with the Samsung gear.) Apple also sports price-performance advantages In certain key areas. iPods have held more memory per dollar since the earliest days of MP3 players, for example. HP was unable to match the iPad. And now the Air and other "computer products" have closed the gap. This is an under-appreciated aspect of Apple's game. Apple sometimes gets software too. I personally loath the one-button-ultra-modal aspect of IOS. But the myriad of brilliant features (e.g., pinch, scroll, etc.) blow me away, in both a design and execution sense. Apple is great at UX-in-the-small. But at application-level, things aren't so balmy. iTunes and its syncing model are frustrating at best. Mail, iCal, and Address Book are only now getting better than (elegant) toys. These three have had serious bugs for years. iWork - forget it. App uninstall is incomplete, leaving many remnants. OSX's underlying file system is a joke, as is MacPorts. Lion's desire to mimic IOS is frustrating at best. Apple is the greatest show on earth based mainly on their brand development and their ability to produce must-have objects. Oh, and I'd (reluctantly) take Win7/Air and IOS/Samsung -based on the strengths of the hardware in each case. A split decision. Bob