Author: Walter Issacson
Publisher: Hachette India
When Steve Jobs was recovering from a liver transplant, a hospital staff asked him to cover his face with a mask. Jobs refused.
The reason: he said he disliked the design of the mask and asked them to bring other options. so particular was he about design that he kept his house empty for eight long years because he couldn’t find furniture and kitchen equipment that fitted into his sense of aesthetics. Only a picture of Einstein was on the wall.
Take, for example, the cover of this authorised biography, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. What you see is not the original cover that the publishers designed; that one, it seems, had a colourful Apple logo. when Jobs saw the design he threw a fit. He told Isaacson that it was “the worst thing he’d ever seen”, and sat down to explain what he wanted, right down to the typeface of the title, its size and where it should be placed.
The elegant and minimalist cover of the book defines the philosophy of Jobs’ life: a singular obsession with design and perfection. His genius lay in using his obsessions to turn a piece of technology into an alluring piece of art with innovation and creativity. this is why every Apple product — the Mac, the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad — looks and feels so sensuous. He would look at every detail of a gadget — right down to the cable and plug. “Simplicity”, he would say, “is the ultimate sophistication”.
Take the iPod, for example. It was the first gadget of its kind — a quantum leap in innovation. It required a superbly smart team to first imagine such a gadget, and then create it. that was the genius of Jobs and the company he created.
His obsession with design and detail started from a very young age when his father would tell him that you must never ignore parts you can’t see, that is why it was important to paint not only the front but even the back of a wardrobe.
Jobs doted on his adoptive parents who raised him, who made many sacrifices to give him an education and to support his ventures. He didn’t hide his bitterness about his biological parents who gave him up for adoption: “They were my sperm and egg bank.” but then he wasn’t a perfect parent either to his first child as he abandoned his girlfriend and their daughter. He was, however, devoted to the family he raised with his wife.
Jobs was also a minimalist — perhaps the result of a combination of his experiments with Eastern mysticism when he visited India in his youth, and the Zen Buddhism that he adopted later as a way of life. despite the billions that he made, he was austere in his personal life. “Material possessions often clutter life than enrich it,” he would say.
But he was no saint. His biographer Isaacson is a former managing editor of Time and his fascinating account gives the reader a balanced view of the good and the dark side of Jobs. It brings out the man’s genius and charisma, and at the same time doesn’t try to hide the contradictions that made some people call Jobs a jerk.
All through the book, Jobs the great innovator, has also been called rude, insensitive, mean, petulant, obnoxious, vengeful, a bully and a tyrant. few dispute his genius; most agree with the nasty adjectives used for him. He was stubborn and driven to the extent of being ruthless.
But he was also charismatic — the proverbial salesman who could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. No, he didn’t do that but he was a catalyst and would convince those who didn’t agree with his ideas through what the Apple software engineer Bud Trubble called Jobs’ “reality distortion field”. Trubble defined it as follows: “In his (Jobs’) presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of particularly anything.”
Be it a tight delivery schedule, a design, some hardware or software, Jobs would always manage to have his way. He even used the “reality distortion field” to convince the best brains to join Apple. He lured John Scully away from Pepsi to become Apple’s CEO by saying, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
What is also amazing about the man is that he visualised these gadgets, what they will do and how they should look, without being an engineer. bill Gates once said, “Jobs didn’t know much about technology but had an amazing instinct for what works.”
The brain behind Apple II, the legendary computer that made him rich and famous at a very young age, was Steve Wozniak a.k.a. Woz.
Woz and Jobs had co-founded Apple in 1976. they were friends but very different from each other. Woz didn’t care if he didn’t get any recognition for his work. He didn’t want power and authority; he was happy being at the bottom of the ladder creating his fascinating circuit-boards. He single-handedly created the Apple I and Apple II computers; Jobs packaged them.
Soon Woz fell out with his friend, but I wonder if he would have created the Apple computer had he worked with someone other than Jobs.that Steve Jobs created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built Apple into the world’s most iconic brand is by now the stuff of legends. but what did it take to achieve that?
Isaacson tells afascinating story: from the making of the first Apple computer to the Mac, the boardroom intrigues that ousted Jobs, his next venture NeXT (why the small “e” and not capital “E”), the story of Pixar and themaking of Toy story, Jobs’ return to Apple in 2000 and the products he created in the last 10 years — from iPod to the iPad. In just 10 years. That’s some innovation!
After Jobs died, Jony Ives, the legendary designer who helped create the MacBook Air, iPod, iPhone and iPad, and who was Jobs’ design soul mate, said: “So his, I think, was a victory for beauty, for purity. And as he would say, ‘For giving a damn.’”
The writer can be contacted at