[thought_alarm]

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.

[msbarnett]

> 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.

[thought_alarm]

> Was the divestiture of their investment in ARM a mistake, looking back?

Do you think there's an even remotely interesting, non-obvious answer to that question? And do we really need Steve Jobs to answer questions about PA Semi? Is that how you would spend your limited time with Steve?

Antennagate. Isaacson chose to focus on Jobs's the response to the problem, and I thought he did a great job. It is a book about Jobs after all, and for the most part I found it fascinating.

I can recommend better books about Apple history, but there are none better about the man himself.

[msbarnett]

> Do you think there's an even remotely interesting, non-obvious answer to that question?

I'm sure of it. The answers to those kind of multi-faceted, tradeoffs no matter which direction you favor questions are precisely what provide real insight into someone's character and decision making, and precisely what Isaacson failed to pursue.

> And do we really need Steve Jobs to answer questions about PA Semi? Is that how you would spend your limited time with Steve?

Getting answers to questions that no one else could answer about what his thoughts and motivations were for making moves that still aren't really understood by many observers? Absolutely.

It would be so much better than a 600 page mess of regurgitated material from folklore.org and fluffy, uncritical overviews of the last ten years.

Take the App Store. Isaacson devotes all of a couple of sentences to mentioning that Jobs was initially against it, but was talked around to the idea. He completely squanders a fascinating exploration of Apple, Jobs, the myth of Jobs as font of all of Apple's good ideas, and the dynamics of one of Apple's most critical successes in the last few years. What were his objections then, and what are his thoughts on it now? Who talked him into it, and how did that play out? How did they approach the idea once Jobs was convinced?

We get no investigation, no insight, nothing of value. Just a declarative sentence from Isaacson stating the obvious, and it's on to the next facile overview.

[snowwrestler]

Each one of these decisions involved numerous other people; these stories are still out there ready to be told. I would ask Siracusa why he, as a tech journalist, has not run down more of these stories himself.

[pwthornton]

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.

[jonhendry]

I disagree. The book could have been a seminal historical document of a major actor in business and technology of the late 20th century and start of the 21st century, the sort of thing that people could turn to for decades.

But if it's barely better than a celebrity bio, and didn't ask the relevant questions, then it's an opportunity missed.

Let's face it: yeah, the 'human interest' story of Jobs' fight with cancer is interesting and will sell books, but it's not what was of value for history.

If you read about George Washington, generally you want to know about the Revolution and the founding of the US, not his final illness and the bleeding treatments he underwent that may have killed him.

Too bad Jobs didn't pick someone a) more technical, and b) more experienced writing bios of living people.