With all due respect, I disagree. This book was widely anticipated and given the unprecedented access that Isaacson had to Jobs' family and Apple execs past and present, this book was mediocre at best.
Personally I was really looking forward to it, when I started reading the book I kept making allowances, thinking that maybe I was expecting too much. I don't read many biographies, so perhaps this is how it's done, after all, the Author wrote an apparently well regarded biography on Einstein.
But Siracusa nails it, when he says most people don't understand theoretical physics, so a biographer can get away with not understanding the stuff that Einstein is famous for (paraphrase). The same is not true for tech, it's forgivable to not know this stuff, but it is unforgivable that seemingly he didn't even try, as evidenced by his obvious lack of insight into the motivations of the man he was writing about.
I would love to see someone like Gruber or Siracusa write the definitive biography of Steve Jobs, because the Isaacson biography isn't that book.
Personally I was really looking forward to it, when I started reading the book I kept making allowances, thinking that maybe I was expecting too much. I don't read many biographies, so perhaps this is how it's done, after all, the Author wrote an apparently well regarded biography on Einstein.
But Siracusa nails it, when he says most people don't understand theoretical physics, so a biographer can get away with not understanding the stuff that Einstein is famous for (paraphrase). The same is not true for tech, it's forgivable to not know this stuff, but it is unforgivable that seemingly he didn't even try, as evidenced by his obvious lack of insight into the motivations of the man he was writing about.
I would love to see someone like Gruber or Siracusa write the definitive biography of Steve Jobs, because the Isaacson biography isn't that book.