Excerpts from this epic review on the Steve Jobs biography

What's that? You say you're sick of all the Steve Jobs coverage? Yeah, well, I haven't cared for Madonna at all in the past 30 years. How's that working out for me? Now be quiet and pay attention!

This article/book review from the New Republic, of which republic I know not of which they refer, is quite valuable for those of us who never will read the Walter Isaacson biography. Below are a few excerpts but if you are so interested in the subject matter, I highly recommend it.

It took a Syrian-American college dropout—a self-proclaimed devotee of India, Japan, and Buddhism—to make the world appreciate the virtues of sleek and solid German design. (Braun itself was not so lucky: in 1967 it was absorbed into the Gillette Group, and ended up manufacturing toothbrushes.)

There are few traces of Jobs the philosopher in Walter Isaacson’s immensely detailed and pedestrian biography of the man. Isaacson draws liberally on previously published biographies, and on dozens of interviews that Jobs gave to the national media since the early 1980s. He himself conducted many interviews with Jobs (who proposed the project to Isaacson), and with his numerous colleagues, enemies, and disciples, but as one nears the end of this large book it’s hard not to wonder what it was that Isaacson and Jobs actually talked about on those walks around Palo Alto. Small anecdotes abound, but weren’t there big themes to discuss?

As Isaacson makes clear, Jobs was not a particularly nice man, nor did he want to be one. The more diplomatic of Apple’s followers might say that Steve Jobs—bloodthirsty vegetarian, combative Buddhist—lived a life of paradoxes. A less generous assessment would be that he was an unprincipled opportunist-a brilliant but restless chameleon. For Jobs, consistency was truly the hobgoblin of little minds (he saw little minds everywhere he looked) and he did his best to prove Emerson’s maxim in his own life.

Jobs’s engagement with politics was quite marginal—so marginal that, except for him lecturing Obama on how to reset the country, there are few glimpses of politics in this book. He did not hold politicians in anything like awe. We see him trying to sell a computer to the king of Spain at a party, and asking Bill Clinton if he could put in a word with Tom Hanks to get him to do some work for Jobs. (Clinton declined.) 

“PURE” WAS THE ultimate compliment that Steve Jobs could bestow. 

THE BAUHAUS LIVES ON in Apple also in other ways. In addition to its minimalism, the Bauhaus also championed an obsession with functionalism—the idea, revolutionary in its time, that form follows function. The Bauhaus enthusiasm for “function” is the precursor of Apple’s enthusiasm for “essence.” But how did the Bauhaus designers and architects explain the functions of their products and structures? Where did they come from, and how were they discovered? 

The task of the designer, then, was not to please or to innovate. It was to uncover and to reveal—rather like scientists; for design is just a tangible, natural, and objective byproduct of history. 

APPLE’S LINKS to Bauhaus, Ulm, and Braun suggest that the company has always operated in a much richer intellectual tradition than is generally recognized. The conventional view—that Apple is unique, so exceptional and so unpredictable that it defies easy categorizations—says more about the inability of technology analysts to cut through Apple’s design philosophy, which, while dense, has been quite consistent over time. While this philosophy has produced a bevy of beautiful products that are tremendously popular with the general public, it would be wrong to ascribe Apple’s success to superior design alone. Jobs never hid the fact that ultimately he was in the business of selling not computers but dreams. He was quite sincere about this. However harsh his business practices were, in his beliefs there was not a trace of cynicism.

APPLE’S EXTRAORDINARY success in the last decade has been owed, to a large extent, to its dogged and methodical commitment to understanding and avoiding the failures of other technology companies. Apple respects business history like no other company. 

Even Google, with its naïve technocratic ethos, is more committed to questioning the impact that it is having on the Internet and the world at large. They fund a bevy of academic and policy initiatives; they have recently launched a Berlin-based think tank dedicated to exploring the social impact of the Internet; they even started a quarterly magazine. Granted, Google is doing this partly in response to mounting regulatory pressure, but even so one must acknowledge that Google has not shied away from engaging many of its critics. Apple, by contrast, holds itself above the fray.