[loboman]

I'm reading and it's good so far, what is everyone complaining about? So far it seems unbiased, instead of the typical heroic novel you get in most other biographies.

[phillmv]

I listened to the podcast over the weekend.

In a nuthsell, Isaacson doesn't understand computing, or the computing industry, and so he let a lot of errors in (OS X contains no NEXT code) and spends a lot of time focussing on things that don't matter.

It's more important because he was the one and only guy that was given that much access and he blew it. He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their face value.

[slantyyz]

He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their face value.

I think you've just summed up modern mainstream journalism.

[pwthornton]

This is really it. For a journalist, I would have expected him to ask my questions, push back at Steve more and do more research.

[martingordon]

I actually found the first half of the book more engaging than the second half. I think part of it was that the second half felt rushed - Isaacson covered too many things without going into much detail for any of them and he made more grammatical mistakes.

My main stylistic gripe, however (which Gruber mentioned on The Talk Show), was that you couldn't tell if Jobs' quotes from the interviews or from the time the events were taking place.

The book was originally scheduled to come out early next year, I believe, and was moved up to late October around the time Steve resigned. The publishers wanted the bio to coincide (read: cash-in on) with Steve's death and we got a rushed product.