Steve Jobs

Jobs asked Isaacson to write it, gave more than forty interviews, encouraged people who disliked him to speak freely, and declined to read it before publication.

That arrangement is the book's foundation and its main claim to reliability. It also means the frame is Jobs's own — he chose the biographer and the moment — and the selection of what mattered in his life is partly his.

He chose the biographer and the moment, which makes the frame partly his even though the text was not.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Isaacson treats the adoption as formative, and Jobs's own comments about feeling both abandoned and specially chosen recur throughout.

The counter-cultural context matters as much: the fruit farm, the experimentation, the trip to India, and the Zen practice he maintained for decades, which Isaacson connects directly to the aesthetic of simplicity that later defined the products.

His account of the founding: one person who could build an elegant machine and another who understood that it had to be a product someone could buy.

His handling of the Atari payment dispute — where Jobs told Wozniak a smaller figure than he had received — is presented plainly and without resolution, and it establishes early a pattern the book returns to repeatedly.

The term colleagues coined for Jobs's capacity to convince people that impossible schedules were achievable, and the book's most useful psychological observation.

Isaacson's treatment is balanced: it produced work people did not believe they could do, and it also produced burnout, dishonesty about what was possible, and decisions that were simply wrong and were held anyway.

His account of the removal from Apple and the years following, which he argues were necessary rather than merely painful.

The Pixar chapters are the most underrated part of the book. Jobs's role was largely as a funder and negotiator rather than a creative force, and the discipline he learned about how a creative organisation actually works shows up in his second period at Apple.

His account of the restructuring: cutting the product line to a few machines, the Think Different campaign, and the sequence of products that followed.

The method Isaacson identifies is consistent: control the entire experience end to end, refuse the customer's stated preference in favour of what they would want once they saw it, and treat design as the primary rather than the final consideration.

The book does not minimise it. Jobs humiliated employees publicly, claimed others' ideas, denied paternity of his daughter for years, and parked in disabled spaces.

Isaacson's position is that the harshness and the results were connected, which he states without endorsing. Readers divide on whether the book ultimately excuses the behaviour by presenting it as inseparable from the achievement, and that is a fair thing to argue about.

Whether presenting the cruelty as inseparable from the achievement amounts to excusing it is a fair argument.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

His account of the cancer diagnosis and of the nine months Jobs spent pursuing alternative treatments before agreeing to surgery.

Jobs himself later expressed regret about the delay. Isaacson reports it directly and does not speculate about the counterfactual, which is the responsible handling of a question that invites speculation.

Its strengths are access and candour. Its weakness, identified by many reviewers, is that Isaacson is stronger on narrative than on analysis — the book reports what happened extensively and explains why less often.

There is comparatively little about how Apple actually worked as an organisation, about the contributions of people other than Jobs, and about the technology itself.

The insistence on controlling the whole experience rather than one layer of it, which is the single most transferable idea in the book and explains most of the specific decisions.

And a clear-eyed view of the cost. The book is frequently read as a manual for how to behave, which is not what it shows: the behaviour damaged people and the results happened anyway, and the two facts are separate.