|
TLDL; Jobs biography not fawning enough for Apple fanboys. The complaints include that Isaacson used "spike it" in reference to killing a story, without explaining it, and that Isaacson wrote "ATM machine" in the book - which if not originally correct, is clearly in popular use today (see also "PIN number"). Clear, penetrating, insightful grammar criticism from Gruber. |
The main complaints were:
1) Isaacson doesn't know anything about the tech industry.
2) Despite knowing he doesn't know anything about the industry he's writing about, he didn't even try to learn anything about it, and it shows.
3) Because of 1) and 2), Isaacson solely focuses on everyday stuff that any lay-person can relate to; this is all fine and well and the anecdotes add color to any biography, but when it is the sole focus of the biography of a man who is interesting precisely because of what he did in and to the tech industry, it entirely misses much of the point of what people find interesting about his life.
4) As the only guy who ever had direct access to Jobs, he should have used that privilege to dig into more of the reasoning of why Jobs did many of the things he did in the industry, not to write some People-magazine style fluffy personal interest story.
5) On a nitpickier level, what little technical detail it contains is often flat-out wrong, like the claim that OS X didn't use or contain any of the software developed at NeXT.