Steve jobs biography review ny times

Now there could be color and fonts and pictures. Using the metaphor of a desktop, the PARC engineers placed small, graphical representations of documents and file folders on the screen, and they built an external, hand-operated pointing device—called a mouse, since that was sort of what it looked like—to navigate the desktop by pointing and clicking to open and close documents and perform other functions.

Do this, he knew, and it would realign the personal computer universe. A year after the Macintosh was released, Jobs was ousted from Apple. Eventually, he made two investments. One was to found a new, high-concept computer company called N e XT. The other was to buy a small computer animation studio being sold off by the filmmaker George Lucas.

Apple, meanwhile, was foundering. His computer company, N e XTaimed to build affordable, Mac-like workstations powerful enough to be used by universities and other research institutions. Mac-like meant stylish and intuitive. Powerful enough meant having sufficient computing power to perform high-level functions. A small cadre of software engineers, some of whom had come from Apple prompting a lawsuitset about developing a new operating system based on UNIXwhich had come out of Bell Labs in the late s and was the first operating system that was not machine-dependent.

At that price, no one was buying. Instead of the ten thousand units the company estimated shipping each month, the number was closer to four hundred. As Isaacson points out, the company was hemorrhaging cash. If he could have found a buyer, he would have unloaded it. Remarkably, the film was nominated for an Academy Award. This led to other short films, one of which, Tin Toydid win an Oscar inand to a deal with Disney for a full-length computer-animated feature film.

Released at the end ofToy Story was the top-grossing film of the year. Steve Jobs introducing the iPad while standing below a photo of himself from the early days of Apple, San Francisco, January The next part of the Steve Jobs story—call it act three—is the one that we are most familiar with because it coincides with a key flashpoint in the lives of even those without the means or desire to buy Apple products: the metastatic growth of the Internet.

Steve jobs biography review ny times: Mr. Isaacson treats “Steve Jobs”

Jobs was prescient in understanding how deeply the Internet could reach into our lives, and that it was not limited just to networking computers. But this time around it catapulted Apple from niche brand to mass-market phenomenon—in part because once consumers entered the iUniverse there were costs associated with leaving it, and because Jobs made sure it was a pleasant place to be.

And even though it became a mass-market brand, it retained its cachet. The coolness factor set Apple apart from the start. The original Mac launch took place shortly after a chilling, Ridley Scott—directed ad suggesting that anyone who used an IBM PC was a drone, while Mac users were people who defy conformity, aired during the Super Bowl, and has become the model for every Apple product launch since:.

The television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what would become the Steve Jobs playbook for making the introduction of a new product seem like an epochal moment in world history. The third component was the public unveiling of the product itself, amid fanfare and flourishes, in front of an audience of adoring faithful mixed with journalists who were primed to be swept up in the excitement.

Steve jobs biography review ny times: “Steve Jobs” is a

It should be noted that Apple product launches are now live-blogged in The New York Times and other major newspapers as if they were sporting events or breaking news. Jobs was so good at this show-and-tell that it did not feel like he was on the stage selling but, rather, that he was up there offering, and what he was offering was the chance to share in the magic.

What this meant in practice was that when Jobs told Apple employees that they could do things that had never before been done, like shrinking circuit boards or writing a particular piece of code or extending battery life, they rose to the occasion, often at great personal cost. And so, in many ways, have most of us, and not just by buying what Steve Jobs was selling—the products and the feeling of being a better smarter, hipper, more creative person because of them.

Through his enchanting theatrics, exquisite marketing, and seductive packaging, Jobs was able to convince millions of people all over the world that the provenance of Apple devices was magical, too. Machina ex deo. While it may be convenient to suppose that Apple is no different than any other company doing business in China—which is as fine a textbook example of a logical fallacy as there is—in reality, it is worse.

Steve Jobs cried a lot. But the heart of the book follows Jobs through his eventful two-part career at Apple. At its core, however, this biography is a fascinating and well-organized collection of titillating tales which reveals his eccentricities but can never quite diagnose what makes Jobs tick. It is possible, of course, that the forces which drove Jobs are simply impenetrable.

Ryan said:. July 18, at am.

Steve jobs biography review ny times: Mr. Jobs's intuition was based

This was one of the easiest to follow biographies I have ever read, similar to reading a magazine profile an extremely lengthy one. It was also, quite simply, an enjoyable book. As you said, Isaacson did a very good job covering the complex and hypocritical character that was Steve Jobs. His writing brought the man alive in my head which is a key component in any biography the ability to pull up the video clips mentioned also helps with this.

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