This book focuses on Steve Jobs' business career, but offers a few interesting insights into Jobs' personal life as well. His beginnings as founder of Apple, being fired from the company he created, and his eventual return make for a story fit for fiction. The authors in this book key into Jobs as a figure of growth, someone who learned from his own mistakes and grew in his later years into an effective visionary and leader that he wasn't when he started Apple. I particularly enjoyed learning about the history of computing and Apple in particular, as this book offered a good overview of the company's recent history. A good read for those interested in technology and leadership. ( )

The most definitive biography of Steve Jobs! ( )

Well, I finished this book at 6:30am on a Sunday morning. What else needs to be said?
Ok, this.
First,I enjoyed this book as a an overview history of the personal computer industry, all of which I have lived through.
But more interestingly, I appreciated the insights into this man Jobs. Given the closeness of the author to Jobs over so many years, and with good access to so many close acquaintances of Jobs, we gain an unusual opportunity to see a life develop. From a**hole to visionary to friend. The final chapters, sharing Jobs transition through his health crisis and his final months, I found particularly moving.
I owe the author Brent Schlender a vote of gratitude for his work pulling this complex picture together. ( )

Not a lot new here other that those things covered by the news upon the book release, such as Cook offer a organ etc. More of a love fest to be sure, I think the Official Biography was much better.
( )

There’s an anecdote at the beginning of this book that causally mentions when Steve Jobs was 24, Apple was selling 3000 computers a month. I’m 25. This made me feel extremely old and mostly useless, but if you’re comparing yourself to Jobs at nearly any point in his life this feels inevitable.

Schlender and Tetzeli skip over a lot of the early days of Apple, painting it in quick brush strokes that still sufficiently illustrates the first ten years of Apple and Jobs’ involvement. They implicitly assume the reader has also read the authorized Walter Isaacson biography. This is fine by me. Like Spider-Man, this is not an origin story I need to see again.

Because this book is not called Steve Jobs (later described in this book by Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO as “deeply disappointing”). It’s called Becoming Steve Jobs. This one is about how the “known” Steve Jobs of the 1980s (whose public persona became stuck on “genius jerk”, or sometimes the other way around) was forced into near-irrelevancy in the 1990s, forged through the fiery failure of NeXT and unprecedented success of Pixar, and emerged in the late–1990s to 2000s to reinstitute what is now the most profitable and one of the most influential companies on the planet.

A special talent of this book is recognize these incredible successes and hold Jobs in high regard, but call him on his inaccuracies. In one particular example about the short-term failures of Pixar prior to 1995, Schlender and Tetzeli state: “Steve would later claim in his life that he had always believed the Pixar would eventually create great content, but that just wasn’t the case.”

At the same time, another part of his puzzling personality, his child-like wonder, is appreciated. I don’t think it’s any mistake that the funniest part of this book is Jobs making the implied metaphor of Microsoft as a butthole in a conversation with Bill Gates, and Gates laughing right along with him.

The finest chapter is the thirteenth: Stanford. It picks apart what really made Jobs tick, and what really made him successful in his second go-around with Apple. If you’ve never read it or watched it, this chapter also has Jobs’s Stanford commencement address printed in full. Like his life, “It was inspiring, confounding, and unabashedly human, to the very end.”

If I was underlining in this book (I can’t, it’s from the library), I would have underlined…

- “Called the eMate, it was an oddly intriguing device that looked like a junior laptop done up in translucent aquamarine, with a bulbous cover and an oblong hole along one edge that functioned as a handle.” [This sounds like a precursor that I didn’t know existed to the first generation iMac, my favorite looking computer Apple has ever made.]


- “People want to paint [Steve Jobs] like he’s Michelangelo, you know? … But he was a real nervous Nelly, like an old-fashioned, tiny, old small businessman saying ‘Shall I cut another nickel off it?’”

- “Steve is not the maniacal business and design despot the media loves to portray—well he is, but not always.” This was a side of Steve’s life that was seldom seen, and he made no attempt to publicize it. The general myth of Steve was a brilliant and driven egotist, who would sacrifice or shove aside anything or anyone for his career, carried the unfortunate corollary that he must have been a bad father and field, and a man incapable of caring and love. It was a stereotype that never came close to gibing with my own experience of him.

- You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. — Jobs

- “That iPhone sitting in your pocket is the exact equivalent of a Cray XMP supercomputer from twenty years ago that used to cost ten million dollars. It’s got the same operating system, the same processor speed, the same data storage, compressed down to a six-hundred-dollar device.” – Mark Andreessen

- “But the sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.” - Job’s wife, Laurene, at his memorial service. ( )