Steve Jobs

About the book

Steve Jobs built Apple with a partner in a garage, lost control of the company he founded, and came back to lead it through its most commercially successful years. Walter Isaacson traces that arc from Jobs's childhood and early electronics tinkering through the founding of Apple, his departure, the years at NeXT and Pixar, and the second Apple era that produced the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. The book draws on extensive interviews with Jobs and with people around him.

Isaacson treats Jobs as a study in temperament as much as a business story. The narrative returns often to the same traits: an insistence on control over hardware and software together, a habit of pushing people past what they thought possible, and a capacity for rudeness that damaged relationships. Colleagues, rivals and family members give conflicting accounts, and Isaacson lets those accounts sit beside one another rather than smoothing them into a single verdict.

The book also documents the products and the arguments behind them: design decisions, marketing, the retail stores, and the fights over how much a company should dictate about how its devices are used. It is a long, chronological account, and the later chapters turn toward illness and mortality.

How to read it

Read it as a reported narrative rather than a management manual. Isaacson organizes material around people and episodes, and the lessons about leadership arrive through scenes and testimony. Watch how often the same behavior appears as both a strength and a cost. The book is more useful when you hold those two readings together instead of choosing one.

The book runs long, and the middle sections on NeXT and Pixar move more slowly than the Apple chapters. Readers short on time can follow the through-line of the Apple years without losing the argument. Pay attention to who is speaking in each anecdote, since much of the book rests on recollection, and some participants had reason to present themselves favorably.

Who it suits

This suits readers curious about how a technology company made decisions about design, manufacturing and marketing, and about the personality that shaped those decisions. It also works for people interested in the history of personal computing and consumer electronics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Readers who want a portrait that includes the difficult behavior will find more here than in a celebratory profile.

Reading considerations

The book is a biography authorized by its subject, and Jobs cooperated with the project while placing few limits on what others could say. That access does not make the account neutral, and readers should treat the portrait as one shaped by its sources. Editions and translations vary in length and framing, so check which version you have before comparing passages with other readers.