Steve wept. And unlike Jesus, who famously wept over the death of Lazarus and the fate of Jerusalem, Jobs cried over just about everything. He cried at the beginning of Apple after Woz's father pushed his son to take more ownership of the company because he thought Jobs wasn't doing much work. Jobs went over to Woz's home and bawled his eyes out. Woz kept him on.

Jobs cried when his employee badge said #2 instead of #1 (which went to Woz), then ended up getting badge #0. He cried when Apple pushed him out of the company. He cried at Pixar during a battle with Disney. He cried when Time put the Mac on its cover instead of him. He cried when he saw the famous Apple "1984" ad for the first time. He cried about Windows "copying" the Mac.

He cried over design questions, like when the iMac team put a tray-based CD drive in the machine rather than a slot-loading drive. He cried over deep issues of personal privacy, such as the moment his cancer first became public and shareholders were braying for information. He cried because he wanted the original Apple II to have a one-year warranty, rather than 90 days.

Indeed, Jobs cries so often in Walter Isaacson's recent biography that the events all blur together, as though the text itself is stained with tears.

The book, though relying on its many candid interviews with Jobs, is something of a squandered opportunity to understand the man. Like Jobs himself, the tears too often remain inscrutable—they are tacked on to the end of events with little to no explanation, and they let us see in Jobs almost anything we want.

Was he a ruthless control freak who cried whenever thwarted, and who used the tears to get his way? Was he a sensitive visionary, so moved by beautiful things that he wept at the sight of them? Was he a deeply emotional man who yet had no trouble belittling and humiliating others? Did he live a life so unusually intense that tears always sat close beneath the surface? Was he unable to control his anger and cried out of sheer rage?

The biography doesn't often tell us; perhaps all interpretations were true at different times. The tears remain ambiguous much of the time, and in that very ambiguity, they sum up the many contradictory sides of Steve Jobs—and his over-the-top, often-offputting-but-incredibly-productive intensity toward life.

The President is on line one



You know you've achieved a special position when the President of the United States calls you directly to ask for personal advice—and when you can call him back on a different day to cajole him into helping you out. That's the kind of person that hippie-nerd-cum-Apple-creator Steve Jobs became during his 56 years on Earth. All he ever wanted to do was achieve awesomeness—and by any means necessary.

Stories like this litter the intimidatingly long biography, the only authorized work on Apple's former CEO. But to read the book just for these juicy tidbits, like Jobs' attitude on fighting Android or why he delayed cancer treatment for nine months, is like picking all the marshmallows from a box of Lucky Charms. (To be fair, though, the book is set up in a way that makes it a little too easy to skim for juicy tidbits and ditch the rest.)

Similarly, to read the book with an eye only for the ways that Jobs could be a vicious jerk (and there are many) is too shallow. Isaacson's book has enough new material on Jobs' emotional and mental approach to life that a full read is necessary to understand Jobs in a way that does more than feed into the competing love-him/hate-him narratives about his life.

The biography is not flattering—there are countless stories about how he has hurt people both personally and professionally over the years. And Jobs knew it would be honest. "I know there will be a lot in your book I won't like," he told Isaacson during one interview. "That's good. Then it won't seem like an in-house book."

Jobs demanded perfection at all times and was willing to go to practically any length to achieve it—even when it seemed unhealthy. One story in the book has Jobs ripping off his oxygen mask in the hospital after his liver transplant in order to demand masks with better designs. Admittedly, he did this under the influence of pain and drugs, but once you get to this point in the book, it's apparent that it was a regular occurrence with Jobs. We all know how uncomfortable it can be to go to a restaurant with someone who is perpetually dissatisfied with his dish—just imagine that person sending it back over and over and over (and over) again, then suggesting ways to improve it. Just reading about this sort of perfectionism can be exhausting.

The well-known flip side of these personality traits was the way they led to products like the iPod and the iPad that changed industrial design, put new kinds of devices in the hands of millions, and made Apple into the most innovative consumer tech company on earth.

But despite the mythos around his "taste" and "vision," Jobs certainly misfired on some key decisions. He was not originally a fan of the now-iconic "silhouette" iPod ads, but later decided that using them had been his own idea. He never wanted to introduce an iPod to the Windows market—mostly because he hated Windows—but eventually did so anyway and ended up making the iPod an even greater success.

And, as confirmed by the book, Jobs not only didn't want third-party native apps on iOS when the operating system first launched, he was adamantly against them until there was so much internal and outside pressure that he finally agreed (mobile apps—particularly on Apple's own App Store—have since become an industry unto themselves and a key driver of Apple hardware sales).

Isaacson's book, of course, is not the first to highlight the tumultuousness of Steve Jobs. Many other unauthorized biographies and books attempt to examine his management style and personality, and many of those books (including Isaacson's) cover the same historical elements. Isaacson's bio of Jobs, however, makes it significantly more apparent how deep Jobs' true feelings were when it came to every aspect of his existence, whether it was the launch of the first Mac or the fantasy yacht that he tried to design and build from scratch as a way to keep focused toward the end of his life. This was a founder who was emotionally invested in every single thing his company did.

Row the boat ashore

Who was Steve Jobs? He comes off as a deeply dissatisfied individual who was also deeply ambitious, someone who made those two qualities feed into one another for the duration of his career.

Age didn't "mellow" him, exactly, but Jobs was more focused after he returned to Apple. He could still be vicious—maybe even more so—but in different and more calculated ways. His focus was to not simply "save" Apple but to show the world how wrong it was about things that supposedly could not be done. For example, one of the main motivators for Jobs to push along the creation of the iPad was to prove to Microsoft that a tablet like that could be done—previously, Microsoft had openly expressed doubt that the mass market would pick up on tablets without turning them into netbooks.

The biography is filled with little details like this—some we've heard before and some we haven't. If you're interested in reading a combination of surface-level history of Apple and personal interviews with Jobs and people close to him, then this would be the place to get it. The writing itself is not great; it gets repetitive, and not in a "just reminding the reader" sort of way. Mike Markkula, for instance, is re-introduced to the reader so many times that it becomes awkward, and some repetitive phrases in the book appear to be direct copy-and-pastes of each other. Simon & Schuster apparently rushed this bio out the door following the news of Jobs' death in October, so be prepared for minimal editing in a quite lengthy book.

Despite this, it's hard not to recommend the bio to those who are interested in Steve Jobs and Apple, especially since virtually none of the unauthorized biographies currently on the market include any details at all about Jobs' personal life or his battle with the cancer that ultimately claimed it. In particular, the book reveals that the way Jobs handled his cancer, treatments, and the possibility of death was a bit less stoic than his 2005 Stanford commencement speech might suggest. While his words during that speech made it sound like he was at peace with his illness and ready to accept death when it came, Isaacson includes some painful-to-read quotes that suggest otherwise.

"I'm either going to be one of the first to be able to outrun cancer like this, or I'm going to be one of the last to die from it," Jobs told Isaacson during one of his more recent medical leaves from Apple. "Either among the first to make it to shore, or the last to get dumped."

Jobs may have been "dumped" a bit earlier than he had hoped, but he spent his life making sure he would never be forgotten. In that sense, at least, he definitely made it to shore.

Though Jobs could be prickly, controlling, and worse, his mortality certainly humanized him. Surely we can all understand why, when Jobs stepped down from his key role at Apple for the last time this summer, he looked back over his life and forward to the years denied him—and he wept.