Becoming Steve Jobs biography: ‘Much of it was chutzpah and self delusion’

Nails the man, but leaves you nostalgic

Valley politics

Of the few previous books about the man rather than the company, Jeffrey Young and William Simon’s iCon (2005) was written against its subject’s wishes, and ended up publicly vilified by Apple; Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (2011) was written with its subject’s full co-operation, and ended up publicly vilified by Apple.

Steve Jobs with OS X interface designers in 2001 shortly before the beta release. Image: Brent Schlender

That vilification has been resurrected in praise of Schlender and Tetzeli, with the official iBooks account tweeting that "Becoming Steve Jobs is the only book about Steve recommended by the people who knew him best". More uroboric still, Jobs’ successor Tim Cook is quoted in the very pages of this book dissing Isaacson’s as "just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written".

This is awkward, because Becoming Steve Jobs, despite touting its authors’ access to Jobs (not something the official biographer lacked), also relies on a great deal of rehashing. This makes it a better book for anyone who only wants to read one book, but if you’ve read some of the others – Owen Linzmayer’s Apple Confidential 2.0, Steven Levy’s Insanely Great, Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple, Steve Wozniak’s iWoz, Michael Moritz’s The Little Kingdom – you’ll find a lot here that’s familiar, meticulously credited in the endnotes. And, yes, the book list includes Isaacson’s too.

Avie Tevanian joined NeXT from university and worked for Jobs for 16 years. A framed set of OS discs was given to him on his promotion to Chief Software Technical Office at Apple in 2003
Image courtesy of Weng-Yu Chan

What with the borrowing, the padding and the co-authoring, Becoming Steve Jobs feels haphazardly constructed in places – more Becoming Becoming Steve Jobs. Emerging from a chunk of narrative, you’re often led through a disquisition on its ramifications, and completing this is no guarantee you won’t find yourself looping back to the same storyline later, with further interpretation. Efforts to impose editorial order are still visible between uncorrected proof and final cut, including the replacement of evocative chapter titles with merely descriptive, as if the reader might stray without a signpost.

But Schlender’s incisive prose always brings enough reward to keep you going. He’s sound on the computer industry stuff, despite the occasional technical infelicity (Jobs didn’t see his first computer with a "bitmapped screen" for the first time at Xerox in 1979 – he was already selling one, the Apple II – and it’s not clear what’s meant by comparing 1985’s million-transistor memory chips with dies that hold "128 trillion discrete elements").

Steve Jobs presents the iPod to an audience of press and Apple employees at Apple's Town Hall on 23rd October 2001. Image: Brent Schlender

There’s depth and detail on the conception of the iPod user experience, the gestation of the iPad and iPhone, and the birth of the Apple Store. If there are times when his assessment of motivation or causation overreaches, he always finds a toehold in fact.

And he pulls no punches. Later, Cook defends Jobs’ participation – along with Catmull and others – in the Silicon Valley wage-fixing scandal. Schlender prints Cook’s defence: "I don’t think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad." Then he points out that this "ignores the simple fact that making such an agreement... is illegal. Steve, apparently, couldn’t be bothered even with acknowledging those rules".

My biggest problem with Isaacson’s biography was staying awake. With Schlender’s, it was getting through a page without stopping to note something illuminating.

Brent Schlender with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in 1991. Image courtesy of George Lange

Besides Jobs, Schlender is good on Bill Gates, again from personal experience: "Some young men and women are bred for corporate life – Bill Gates comes to mind. Steve was not." But just as Jobs, particularly in the early days, heartlessly punches down ("Steve didn’t know how to deal with people who didn’t have power," explains the more sensitive Catmull), Gates will snap at employees: "That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard."

Jobs, however, only gradually acquires Gates’ ability to disguise his contempt for people he needs to do business with. NeXT loses a lucrative IBM partnership because Jobs treats IBM’s people like dirt. Microsoft’s IBM deal falls apart for the more mundane reason that they can’t agree on what OS/2 is supposed to be.

Software chief Avie Tevanian with Steve Jobs. Image: Brent Schlender

But Gates trounces Jobs in hardware by understanding that corporates want speed and reliability, not innovation, and the rising tide of Wintel capability will wash away the high-end workstation market to which Jobs, trying to make a virtue of an obligation not to compete with Apple, has hitched NeXT.