Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
- 27 minutes read - 5685 wordsAuthor: Walter Isaacson
Rating: ★★★
This book appeared in the “little library” in front of the nearby St. Ignatius' Episcopalian church during one of the later phases of COVID and I had meant to read it then, but then came welcoming new life and reading time turned scarce. I had to wait until surgery recovery this past week to read it.
During the press junkets around the book, I was chiefly struck by Isaacson’s report of the desire by the subject (and even his subject’s family!) to report his life as it actually was. What was fascinating is that Jobs had a horrible reputation in and around Santa Clara county. From jerk behavior in the Whole Foods parking lot to jerk behavior on 280 (whom hadn’t he cut off?). Getting an honest assessment by a friend would still have felt like a hatchet job. But, it was related, that Jobs wanted his children to know who he was, why he wasn’t around, what his errors and regrets were, and what drove him. Knowing he would die fairly young, he knew that without a true testament, his younger children might never know him. To some extent I think he feared that his children would reveal some of himself to themselves and not understand “Dad was like that too.” So it was critical that he leave a true appraisal. The book ends with the belief that while it had not been flattering to Jobs, it had been faithful.
So as a gift of Jobs to his children, the book succeeds. But as a biography, it failed for me because it failed to tie his Icarian ascent, time in Hades, Icarus resurgent narrative together fully. There was some connective tissue that a biographer needed to provide that I simply didn’t get.
Isaacson’s task must have been extremely difficult owing to Jobs’s reality-distortion field that seemed to make the impossible possible: deadlines, low-cash balances, squaring off with more-powerful industry titans, etc. play out the way he wanted. He seemed to have a knack for eradicating doubt and getting to yes. In many ways, I wondered whether Isaacson would wind up being an instrument in Jobs’s own curated orchestra of his own hagiography. Jobs clearly had a ready collection of tropes and anecdotes that he used to frame himself to the public knowing, in turn, that those frames would be used by the public to frame him. It’s amazing how many times some of those tropes (e.g. Edwin Land, calling Bill Hewlett) surface in the book and various other public activities (e.g. commencement at Stanford).
Isaacson accepts Jobs’s frame as a “son of Santa Clara,” a Zen Dharma Bum in India, a founder at the dawn of the silicon era from Atari to Apple, the spurned enfant terrible, the restless, the creative, the enabler of art, the CEO, etc. On the skeleton of these myths, Isaacson builds the biography. And yet Isaacson is not completely snowed over. He seems to resist gamely in narrating these skeletal planks.
Jobs is clearly awful, yet he’s clearly gifted in creating product. He’s clearly an awful manager, but he’s clearly an amazing source of inspiration. And yet he is these received narratives and he’s also not there as well. The more you dig the more the man refuses a reductive summation.
My favorite passages were the tales of early Santa Clara county – where I spent a decade or so. When I drove into the valley out of the garlic and peach and apricot laden air of Gilroy in 2000 it was pure magic to behold the South Bay. I’ve been to those GI Bill houses in the shadows of mountains from San Jose to San Mateo. I’ve walked the El Camino Real past kitschy pizza places and Homestead High. I’ve been to DeAnza community college. Isaacson really captures that feel that was petering out when I showed up in the South Bay. Once there was such an organic relationship between the work, the neighbors, the neighborhoods, and the boundless opportunity and sunshine of California. It’s gone now to the best I can tell – atomized in the social media era and carrying on as spectral rituals, signs sans signifieds. But Isaacson does a lovely job helping Steve conjure the magic of that era.
From the thread of “child of Santa Clara” childhood years through to the release of the Macintosh, the book really hits its stride. Honestly, there’s not too much interesting to tell after that.
But what I was really after was not very well covered at all. I wanted details about the era after Jobs was fired from Apple: the founding of NeXT computers. Technologically NeXT was hugely important, and I wanted more insights about what that time and this company meant to Jobs and how the team built that product and company. In this era, Isaacson’s coverage is curiously anemic and unsatisfying – especially since Isaacson uses this era as the launchpad for the “greatest CEO” era leading up to Jobs’s death.
Given this line:
What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II [NeXT]"
I thought I was going to get a lot more there, but I didn’t. Basically it’s told as a startup-in-an-office-park story where the product doesn’t get much traction but is also built with the ridiculous design specifications of Jobs. But what about what was innovative about NeXT? What was the company like? What was the board like? What were some of the interesting discussions? What was the culture like? What about its interesting programming environment (that later became the basis of the iPhone). Nothing. The real star arc of that era is the romance of Laurene Powell (who seems lovely) and the stumbling into Pixar ownership/leadership.
If you’re going to tell me the next era was pivotal, I need some pivotal stories and moments.
(The Pixar topic was covered, at best, perfunctorily and only served to show that when it came to megalomania, Jobs could dish up there with the major Hollywood players: Iger, Eisner, Katzenberg, etc.)
And even after Jobs’s return to Apple, Isaacson doesn’t often explicitly tie specific failures and insights from the NeXT era into gold at Apple. This failure was a disappointment from a business biography point of view. On top of that, the important of the NeXT era doesn’t become clear in retrospect after he returns to Apple as CEO. The facts there don’t support the idea that he “learned” or “got better” or “learned his lesson.” Rather, it seems to be coincidence and luck that Apple was so bled-out that the board couldn’t resist him and that the market was ready for some of his product genius (and Jony Ive’s design godhood: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad).
Additionally, Apple’s investment in educating itself internally (i.e. to build a company that could carry on without him in the way he would have carried) via Apple University merited more than the scant few sentences it got. If Jobs viewed his ultimate product in his final act as “the company itself” talking about the means by which the company would remain permanently cast on Jobs’s golden path needed some thought. The Jobs-as-CEO-Unbound final third of the book was basically a timeline with a few anecdotes. For this reason the first 33-50% of the book are wildly more entertaining, touching, and interesting than the remainder.
If you love Apple or NeXT or Santa Clara I might suggest read from the start to the firing. Isaacson has little insight to provide past that mark.
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"author": "Walter Isaacson",
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"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the founder of HP, in teh phone book and call him to get parts.",
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"highlight": "Shockley...one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View...in 1956...[built] transistors using silicon rather than...germanium. [He] became erratic...which led eight of his engineers---most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore -- to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor...in 1968...[Noyce] took Gordon Moore and founded ...Intel.",
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"highlight": "When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never forget that moment....[he would] feel apart -- detached and separate -- from both his family and the world",
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"type": "Note",
"highlight": "After a few months, he no longer required the bribes [of lollipops and $5.00 to do math workbooks]. \"I just wanted to learn and to please her.\"",
"annotation": "It's a tough spot, you want to help someone, but the help requires you to transition to the unethical in order to inspire the behavior that will remove the unethical and will motivate achievement. What are we supposed to do? It helped, certainly, that Jobs demonstrated such capacity, but there are TONS of students who aren't as visible in their display of capability. What then? This seems like a mess, but a fortunate accident of history.",
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"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...it was clear...[to] himself,...his parents...his teachers, that he was intellectually special...[it was proposed] he skip two grades and go right into seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep in challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more sensibly to have him skip only one grade. The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself with kids a year older.",
"annotation": "It's sad that this is the best we can do. Within the band of a grade, there's no way to give those who need more challenge a customized experience of it. The best solution is to say that that challenge is restricted to a different band and we are going to put you in that band. It's brutish thinking.",
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"highlight": "\"The guy who lived right there taught me how to be a good organic gardener and to compost. He grew everything to perfection. I never had better food in my life. That's when I began to appreciate organic fruits and vegetables.\"",
"annotation": "That theme of perfect and observation and veneration of those who create or grow perfect things happens here. It's strange because it's so Santa Clara valley in that it has ingenuity and loving the land as was done in the valley before the per se siliconization of those attributes happened.",
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"highlight": "...[H]e said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. \"The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it.\"",
"annotation": "He correctly sees the thinness of the evangelical proposition. There's either a mystery cult around a man beyond a man who lived an exemplary life -- or there's a systematization, a dulling of that transcendent thing into a system of symbols and veneration of the artifacts that give those symbols and practices power (the book says so)",
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"highlight": "Jobs wrote poetry and played guiltar. He could be brutally cold and rude to her at times, but he was also entrancing and able to impose our will. \"He was an enlightened being who was cruel...That's a strange combination\"",
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"type": "Note",
"highlight": "IN fact he refrained from even saying good-bye or thanks [upon matriculation]. He recounted the moment later with uncharacteristic regret: It's one of the things in life I really feel ashamed about. I was not very sensitive, and I hurt their feelings. I shouldn't have. They had done so much to make sure I could go there, but I didn't want them around.",
"annotation": "",
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"type": "Note",
"highlight": "\"Steve is very much Zen...It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.\"",
"annotation": "",
"location": 35
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{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes...and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting...I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.",
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"location": 41
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"highlight": "Bushnell...\"There is somethign indefinable in an entrepreneuer, and I saw that in Steve...interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects...[Urging] Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.",
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"highlight": "This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of staring his own business.",
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"type": "Note",
"highlight": "[Wozniak] had been designing a terminal, with a keyboard and a monitor that would connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could put some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the terminal itself, so it could become a small stand-alone computer on a desktop",
"annotation": "The terminal paradigm runs from roughly the birth of unix around 1969 all the way to 1980 roughly as terminals are traded for microcomputers",
"location": 60
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{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper...that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with teh feelings of the customer...truly understand their needs better than any other company...focus...to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities...third...impute...people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals it conveys...We may have the best product...if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod...impute the desired qualities",
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"location": 78
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"highlight": "....he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a dent in the universe",
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Bill Atkinson...a doctoral student in neuroscience who had experimented with his fair share of acid.",
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{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs's own more precise terminology, \"a shithead who sucks.\"...Raskin enlisted...Atkinson, who fell on the other side of Jobs's shithead/genius division of the world",
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"highlight": "Atkinson said. \"Because I didn't know it couldn't be done, naivete\"",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Jobs had been referring to computers as a bicycle for the mind...",
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"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...Susan Kare",
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a \"born-in-America gene for Apple's DNA\" that would produce a \"California global\" look...\"Form follows emotion\"...from then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration \"Designed in California.\"",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers...Dan Farber",
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{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "\"...the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe...I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I've done in my life.\" Years later most of those in the audience would be able to laugh about...[such]...episodes and agree with him that creating that giant ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.",
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"highlight": "\"Flying that flag was really stupid...telling the rest of the company they were no good [Arthur Rock]",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...he still wanted to be viewed as a denizen of the counterculture rather than the corporate culture. But he also realized, deep inside, that he had increasingly abandoned the hacker spirit.",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "[The 1984 ad] would eventually be selected...as the greatest commercial of all time...Jobs found ways to ignite blasts of publicity that were so powerful the frenzy would feed on itself, like a chain reaction",
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what would become the Steve Jobs playbook",
"location": 167
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I think it's mroe like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it",
"location": 178
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don't always win.",
"annotation": "On the Windows supremacy",
"location": 179
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "They had hired Sculley to control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in control",
"location": 182
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Gasse...\"[Jobs] has his own way with the truth.\"",
"location": 182
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "[Woz] \"I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust.\"",
"location": 218
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "\"It's hard to think that a a $2 billion company ewith 4,300 employees couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans\"",
"annotation": "He could really be self-serving in his portrayal of facts",
"location": 218
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "[Art Rock] \"The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost...\"",
"location": 219
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II",
"location": 219
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...just staying in France, maybe settling down, perhaps indefinitely....Jobs didn't want to. He was burned but still ambitious. \"I am a reflection of what I do,\" he told her.",
"annotation": "Beautiful passage from Redse in the passage too. \"I like to think that in that moment's hesitation before our bold futures reclaimed us, we lived the simple life together all the way into our peaceful old ages...\"",
"location": 264
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn't wish on anyone, she said.",
"location": "264-265"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel...and the decision to open Apple Stores...so that the Apple style of decision-making would be embedded in the culture",
"annotation": "",
"location": 461
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "[Ive]: [Jobs] has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody...Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 462
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street...\"Apple can create products like the iPad...[because] we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts\"",
"location": 494
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials / In fact Jobs had set his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 509
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "\"I like being responsible for the whole user experience. We do it not to make money. We do it because we want to make great prodcuts, not crap like Android.\"",
"location": 509
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it's technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.",
"location": 527
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "We didn't know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahlwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times.",
"location": 530
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Jobs's relationship with his wife was sometimes complicated but always loyal. Savvy and compassionate, Laurene Powell was a stabilizing influence and an example of his ability to compensate for some of his selfish impulses by surrounding himself with strong-willed and sensible people.",
"location": 543
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation.",
"location": 567
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear...Moby-Dick and the poems of Dylan Thomas...",
"location": 19
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...Heathkits...came with all the boards and parts color-coded, but the manual also explained the theory of how it operated...It made you realize you could build and understand anything.",
"location": 16
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Jobs wrote poetry and played guitar. He could be brutally cold and rude to her at times, but he was also entrancing and able to impose our will. \"He was an enlightened being who was cruel...That's a strange combination\"",
"annotation": "",
"location": 32
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "IN fact he refrained from even saying good-bye or thanks [upon matriculation]. He recounted the moment later with uncharacteristic regret: It's one of the things in life I really feel ashamed about. I was not very sensitive, and I hurt their feelings. I shouldn't have. They had done so much to make sure I could go there, but I didn't want them around.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 34
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "\"Steve is very much Zen...It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.\"",
"annotation": "",
"location": 35
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes...and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting...I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 41
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Bushnell...\"There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve...interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects...[Urging] Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 55
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of staring his own business.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 55
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "[Wozniak] had been designing a terminal, with a keyboard and a monitor that would connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could put some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the terminal itself, so it could become a small stand-alone computer on a desktop",
"annotation": "The terminal paradigm runs from roughly the birth of Unix around 1969 all the way to 1980 roughly as terminals are traded for microcomputers",
"location": 60
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper...that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer...truly understand their needs better than any other company...focus...to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities...third...impute...people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals it conveys...We may have the best product...if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod...impute the desired qualities",
"annotation": "",
"location": 78
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "....he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a dent in the universe",
"location": 92
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Bill Atkinson...a doctoral student in neuroscience who had experimented with his fair share of acid.",
"location": 93
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs's own more precise terminology, \"a shithead who sucks.\"...Raskin enlisted...Atkinson, who fell on the other side of Jobs's shithead/genius division of the world",
"annotation": "Funny writing",
"location": 95
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Atkinson said. \"Because I didn't know it couldn't be done, naivete\"",
"location": 100
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Jobs had been referring to computers as a bicycle for the mind...",
"location": 115
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...Susan Kare",
"annotation": "Goddess behind all the Mac icons",
"location": 130
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a \"born-in-America gene for Apple's DNA\" that would produce a \"California global\" look...\"Form follows emotion\"...from then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration \"Designed in California.\"",
"location": "131-132"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers...Dan Farber",
"location": 137
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "\"...the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe...I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I've done in my life.\" Years later most of those in the audience would be able to laugh about...[such]...episodes and agree with him that creating that giant ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.",
"annotation": "",
"location": "143-144"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "\"Flying that flag was really stupid...telling the rest of the company they were no good [Arthur Rock]",
"annotation": "",
"location": 145
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...he still wanted to be viewed as a denizen of the counterculture rather than the corporate culture. But he also realized, deep inside, that he had increasingly abandoned the hacker spirit.",
"location": 163
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "[The 1984 ad] would eventually be selected...as the greatest commercial of all time...Jobs found ways to ignite blasts of publicity that were so powerful the frenzy would feed on itself, like a chain reaction",
"location": 165
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what would become the Steve Jobs playbook",
"location": 167
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it",
"location": 178
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don't always win.",
"annotation": "On the Windows supremacy",
"location": 179
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "They had hired Sculley to control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in control",
"location": 182
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Gassé...\"[Jobs] has his own way with the truth.\"",
"location": 182
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "[Woz] \"I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust.\"",
"location": 218
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "\"It's hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 employees couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans\"",
"annotation": "He could really be self-serving in his portrayal of facts",
"location": 218
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "[Art Rock] \"The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost...\"",
"location": 219
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II",
"location": 219
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...just staying in France, maybe settling down, perhaps indefinitely....Jobs didn't want to. He was burned but still ambitious. \"I am a reflection of what I do,\" he told her.",
"annotation": "Beautiful passage from Redse in the passage too. \"I like to think that in that moment's hesitation before our bold futures reclaimed us, we lived the simple life together all the way into our peaceful old ages...\"",
"location": 264
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn't wish on anyone, she said.",
"location": "264-265"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel...and the decision to open Apple Stores...so that the Apple style of decision-making would be embedded in the culture",
"annotation": "",
"location": 461
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "[Ive]: [Jobs] has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody...Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 462
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street...\"Apple can create products like the iPad...[because] we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts\"",
"location": 494
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "...Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials / In fact Jobs had set his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.",
"annotation": "",
"location": 509
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "\"I like being responsible for the whole user experience. We do it not to make money. We do it because we want to make great products, not crap like Android.\"",
"location": 509
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it's technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.",
"location": 527
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "We didn't know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahlwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times.",
"location": 530
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Jobs's relationship with his wife was sometimes complicated but always loyal. Savvy and compassionate, Laurene Powell was a stabilizing influence and an example of his ability to compensate for some of his selfish impulses by surrounding himself with strong-willed and sensible people.",
"location": 543
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation.",
"location": 567
}
]
}