One of Steve Jobs’ favorite recordings was The Beatles working on version after version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
The new Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, is like that recording: It serves up fresh takes on oft-told stories from Apple’s history, this time with more sugarcoating.
I enjoyed the book, which was written by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, a pair of long-time writers for business magazines. It’s slick and fast-moving. At times it’s glib, in that familiar business mag way, but its stories are briskly told and the book rarely gets bogged down.
I was impressed with its professionalism. The authors frequently find new ways to recount anecdotes that Apple fans have heard dozens of times before. That alone is no mean feat, but it’s akin to hearing a chorus sung with a slightly different harmony.
The meat of the book is Jobs’ “wilderness years,” the decade he spent exiled from Apple, working at NeXT and Pixar. It coincides with the two decades Schlender spent covering Jobs for The Wall Street Journal and Fortune. It’s based on dozens of interviews and encounters, on and off the record, during that time. Schlender and Jobs became “friends,” in a weird reporter/subject kind of way, and the best parts of the book concern their friends-but-not-really relationship.
Becoming Steve Jobs is pretty brutal about the early days at Apple, when Jobs wreaked havoc and terror while driving projects like the Apple III into the ground. His management incompetence continued at NeXT and Pixar, and the book mercilessly catalogs all his failures, mistakes and dreadful behavior.
At worst, Jobs was indecisive and incompetent. At best, he was incredibly lucky to work with people like Pixar’s Ed Catmull, who kept him at arm’s length so he couldn’t screw up the animation studio.
Lessons from Steve Jobs’ failures?
This sets up the second half of the book, where we are supposed to learn how Jobs’ earlier failures taught him important management techniques that he puts to use resurrecting Apple.
Unfortunately, the book is light on these details.
We never really learn exactly what Jobs did to put Apple back on the path to success. How Jobs became a better manager, businessperson and all-round human being during his exile isn’t really addressed, although the book claims over and over to do so.
Much has been made of the authors’ access to Apple’s top brass. For the first time, we get on-the-record interviews with Apple executives like Cue, Tim Cook and Jony Ive, as well as Pixar’s Catmull and John Lasseter, Disney chief Bob Iger and NeXT old-timers like Susan Barnes, Mike Slade and Jon Rubinstein (who’s actually talked several times before).
While it’s great to get these folks on the record, it doesn’t add up to much, with the exception of one explosive revelation that Cook was willing to donate part of his liver to his dying boss. There are a couple of new stories and quotes about Apple, but not much. There’s little detail about how Apple’s products were developed — the processes and problems, the setbacks and solutions.
What we get, mostly, are testimonials from former colleagues that, yeah, Jobs could be a bastard, but it was never personal — and it was all for the sake of the company or the products. Every chapter contains long sections where former colleagues proclaim that Jobs had matured or changed or learned this lesson or that, but it doesn’t show how. These declarations are then followed by more examples of Jobs’ callous, imperious behavior.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Giving short shrift to Jony Ive
To take one example, Becoming Steve Jobs declares that Jobs’ most important creative relationship was with Jony Ive. But again, it tells instead of shows.
In fact, the description of Ive and his contributions is a huge disappointment. I don’t want this to sound too self-serving, because of my own book about Ive, but I was really disheartened by the coverage of the designer, whose industrial design department was — and is — Apple’s main idea factory.
Schlender and Tetzeli start by saying Ive was an admirer of Braun designer Dieter Rams, a glib cliche that’s become an internet meme. But after listing Ram’s “Ten Principles of Good Design,” they leave it at that.
I was a bit shocked. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect in a high school term paper, not a “definitive” account. After that, there’s a passage toward the end of the book where Ive describes — in his maddeningly abstract way — his relationship with Jobs, but again, little specific is divulged.
In the entire book, there’s no fresh insight into how Jobs, Ive and many others turned Apple into the world’s most devastating design-led corporation.
Becoming Steve Jobs suffers from the same problem as Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography and many other accounts — we hear only from a small number of executives, and they focus on Jobs’ personal life, not his professional one. Few have detailed exactly how he ran Apple or how the company came up with the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Most of the products in Jobs’ long career are covered in a page or two, and in almost no detail.
Unfortunately, this is stuff Apple considers an industrial trade secret. It’s a big part of how the company is so successful, and not the kind of information Apple wants divulged. I have been explicitly told this by several former Apple executives and staffers. Samsung may be able to copy Cupertino’s gadgets, but Apple doesn’t want the Korean company copying its internal processes.
This is why the interviews with Apple’s executives in Becoming Steve Jobs are disappointing. Despite claims that Apple has become more open after Jobs’ death, the company is still not talking about the interesting stuff. Much of this has been documented by Joel Podolny’s internal Apple U project but remains top secret. Perhaps one day Podolny will publish these case studies — he’s an academic, after all — but until then, what is perhaps the definitive account is hidden from the public.
Becoming Steve Jobs is too Steve-centric
And that’s the problem: Becoming Steve Jobs offers the same Steve-centric view of Apple we’ve gotten so many times before.
There’s an illustrative quote from Bill Gates toward the end that explains the problem with focusing only on the executive view: “Steve and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story’s too complicated,” Gates says.
In my opinion, that’s not necessarily true. Some of the best stories published about Apple come straight from the rank and file. Take Andy Hertzfeld’s Revolution in the Valley, taken from his online Folklore project. It digs into the Macintosh project, as told by the engineers that built that revolutionary computer. In my opinion, the “definitive” book about Jobs would be one that concentrated on his professional life, and blended the Steve-centric view with those of the many people who worked with him at Apple and elsewhere.
For instance, Jobs has a reputation for being decisive — fearsomely so — but in fact, in many cases he was not. A close colleague describes him like this in Becoming Steve Jobs: “People want to paint him as Michelangelo, you know,” former NeXT colleague Mike Slade says. “But he was a real nervous Nelly, like an old-fashioned, tiny, old, small businessman saying, ‘Shall I cut another nickel off it?’ Like a junk merchant.”
It’s the book’s most surprising quote, completely at odds with Jobs’ public image. But Jobs was indecisive, sometimes cripplingly so. He was so unsure about the furniture in his house, it remained famously unfurnished. He even dithered about how to treat the cancer that tragically took his life. In fact, Jobs’ indecisiveness is rich territory to explore. But it’s counter to his image and reputation, so it is left alone in this biography.
I wouldn’t argue that Jobs is a much more complex character than he’s been portrayed in previous books, but his obvious talents and contributions aren’t spelled out in Becoming Steve Jobs. Despite the publisher’s claims, this isn’t the book that throws light on how Jobs operated. It just says it is.
While it’s not really fair to criticize authors for the book they didn’t write, Becoming Steve Jobs suffers from the same problem as Isaacson’s biography and many other accounts — it focuses on Jobs’ personal life, not his professional one.
And we’ve heard that tune before.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
13 responses to “The problem with Becoming Steve Jobs? Too much Steve Jobs”
This sounds like a sour grapes review. He wants a book a hour Steve to be about Jony. Oh but he wrote that book. Based all on conjecture and few interviews. Whatever, I’m enjoying it.
Nope, I agree with Leander’s assesment. Took me one day to read the book and there was very little new information in it. Better than Isaacson’s book only in that it covered more of NeXT and Pixar years. But it was way too short to properly cover Steve’s return to Apple up until his death. There were only a few pages dedicated to the development of iPod, iPhone and iPad. And the authors wrongly give Ive credit for iPod’s scroll wheel when in fact Phil Schiller came up with the idea.
This was a concern for me. Like you, I’ve come to the point that I’ve pretty much heard all these stories before and was hoping to get a fresh take on things. I guess what ultimately sold me on this book was Apple’s stance that the previous book was not very accurate and this one is more definitive. About the only thing I learned from the previous book was that I didn’t need the hard copy version. There was nothing especially ‘archival’ about it.
I’d have to agree with this review. Also, Andy Hertzfeld’s book is probably one of the best about the early days at Apple, and does get into how Steve Jobs was as a manager back then.
I am currently reading this book, and so far, it always leaves me wanting more detail. Its interesting, but it really illustrates how incompetent Steve was as a manager. Obviously, the Apple II and the Macintosh were a success, but that was more because of the engineers involved, and not really Steve.
Saying there’s too much Steve in a book of Steve is like saying there is too much FDR in his biography and not enough about Eleanor. I haven’t read either of the books mentioned but would expect them to be more about Steve than any other associate/ friend/ anyone else.
Most corps are stuck in a gladiatorial stage built on empty financial aspirations. (Apple “frittered” around in this archaic fashion for most of a decade.) Then Apple stepped into conscious commitment ‘cus its leader Jobs was also its reborn hero, now unassailable in his pursuit of a personal and explicit mission: to make the best for the rest. Jobs’s hero status bought him time, and his success bought Cook time. The current stage is all about Cook transcending the hero mythos in favor of a corporate ethos based on a worthy and durable mission.
WTF do you expect a book called “Becoming Steve Jobs” to be about, you f*&king moron.
I think he was hoping it wouldn’t just be a rehash of stuff anyone who’s been paying attention already knew?
“The problem with Becoming Steve Jobs? Too much Steve Jobs”
Oh jeez. Do we really need a •review• of a book about Steve? If we’re interested, we’ll read the book. If not, we won’t. Reviews are so problematic. No matter how word-smithed the review is (and this one certainly is), they’re usually as pointless as a movie or music review. Too many biases on the table, too many honest points of view.
Over the years I’ve read every published book about Apple and Steve Jobs, and feel I know everything I need to know about him: he was a man, a visionary, ambitious, lazy, smart, impatient, thoughtful, thoughtless, sometimes cranky, often generous, sometimes abusive to co-workers and employees, learned in school, learned on the job, suffered abandonment issues, borrowed technology from others (some say “stole”… whatever) and made it better, co-invented and/or co-envisioned many things in order to bring us remarkable new and improved technologies, and built one of the most successful and respected technology companies in history. He was also a flawed individual… as are we all.
Too bad the highest-ranking politicians and former leaders aren’t scrutinized as often and much as Steve Jobs. Otherwise, they’d probably be behind bars for war crimes and wide-scale human and cultural atrocities.
Just •my• opinion, of course, but Steve Jobs deserves to rest in peace for a while.
Thank you for this. This is the most candid review of this book i read so far. And uh, I’ll pass. Revolution in the Valley sounds like a much better read for someone who wants get ahead in their career. Instead of, you know, swinging from a dead guys nuts.
The statement that there is “too much Steve” in this book is unfair to the book. What Leander (and many of us want) is a candid in-depth book about the inner workings of apple over the years and yet we keep getting more and more books about Steve instead as if he is the end all be all of the entire company. So to blame this book for that is unfair, but let’s hope this becomes the definitive Jobs book and we can move on to looking at the rest of Apple now and let Steve’s legacy stay the way it is.
Leander writes, “At worst, Jobs was indecisive…,” and then, “…Jobs has a reputation for being decisive…” So which is it, then, Leander? ;-)
It’s an interesting book review that probably saved me a few bucks. Instead think I’ll look at Leander’s “Ive” book or Andy Hertzfeld’s book (I always liked Andy a lot anyway)
Perhaps there’s not *that* much more to learn about how Apple works… They have a great brand. They have great products. They have leaders who “get it.” What more are we looking for???