It is weird. Jobs was divisive and (not infrequently) abrasive, and why would you miss a tech billionaire anyway? Yet I also feel indebted to him and to the folks at Apple who helped to produce some of my favorite products like the Mac, the iPod, and the iPad.
Jobs also said a lot of things that still resonate with me. Recently Apple introduced a "classic Mac" screensaver that shows how carefully designed the original Mac GUI was. I'm sure nobody misses the days when app bugs could crash the OS, but I wish Apple were as obsessive now about detail now as they were back then.
Now that I'm becoming an old man, I've taken the time to go back and listen to him properly, to analize his thoughts and words a bit more contextually, and I've come to believe that Steve Jobs was quite misunderstood, both by us, and by himself. When I miss him I think: his thoughts were so very refined for his time, it is quite incredible and I wish he was around to hear more of them. I guess I'm a fan? Oh well...worse things to be.
He's definitely misunderstood. If you read his biography it's incredible how much the author of it misunderstands, but if you read between the lines you can see through them. In particular you should note how he changes before and after getting married.
The biography is really awful though. It constantly misquotes people - Bill Gates is directly quoted as saying something so technically inaccurate he can't possibly have said it.
I also remember that every time his son is quoted it's because he was telling a dick joke. At one point the book claims this is why Apple Park is a circle. Why the author did this is not clear to me.
(Btw, I have an unreported Jobs story about this myself. Actually two. I'm not going to tell them, so feel free to just imagine.)
I think "becoming Steve Jobs" is a far better book.
I feel like the official Isaacson biography was trying to tell a story, and would twist facts and reality to fit that story. This certainly makes for entertaining reading, but is not a great way to study history.
Meanwhile "Becoming Steve Jobs" gives the reader glimpses into Jobs's life, often very contradictory glimpses, ones that don't really tell you what to think. It shows you how complex of a person he really was.
I don’t remember many details from the biography at this point, but I remember not liking it either. It seemed like it was written with the assumption the reader already knew the about Steve’s more public life and career, and skipped over much of it. It didn’t feel like it would be a good source for future generations to learn about Steve, as it seemed to largely ignore the entire reason a book was being written about him. I also remembering it seeming largely negative, trumpeting the views of critics, and while downplaying the good to balance it out. Though this could also be my memory fading, feel free correct me if I’m wrong.
It was my first Isaacson biography, and didn’t leave me excited for another one.
It definitely was, but at least parts of that must have been warranted given Jobs refused to read it, saying something along the lines of "I know I wouldn’t like what it says"
I still think about how he tried to cure cancer with crystals and then when that didn’t work he used his wealth to get residency in a different state to jump in line for a transplant and still died before his yacht got completed. I don’t misunderstand him at all. Especially the parking in handicap spaces part. Very easy to understand what kind of person he was through his actions. Perhaps we will never see eye to eye, and I feel posts like yours do deserve legitimate opposition as applicable.
When you speak ill of Jobs you are speaking on his moral character. When others (incl. myself) speak positively on Jobs, they are speaking on his design, business, and life philosophies, which are quite profound. [0]
How you want to weigh the two is up to you, but it is not a contradiction to say someone contains both good and bad.
The worst part of internet culture is the conflation of simplicity and reductionism. Comments are short, people have different contexts, so there’s an instinct to reduce everything to binary and fight to the death over the binary value.
Worst of all is the false good person / bad person dichotomy that leads to great offense at any slight praise for someone the reader has decided is a bad person, or any slight criticism of someone the reader has decided is a good person.
I can’t think of anything less fruitful than arguing over whether a public figure’s personal plus professional life makes them a 100% good person or 100% bad person. It’s strange the conversation ever happens, and yet it’s so incredibly common.
Ok, but more or less everyone is going to have a few things about them that you’re not going to like. When your whole life is up for scrutiny and you have unlimited resources, that’s how it is. If you had a billion dollars there’d be plenty of things people would criticize about you. And anybody else who did too.
Sure. On the one hand, everything adhered to the letter of the law. On the other, he used his money to get served before other people in an otherwise similar position would have been able to do.
I personally view that as more of a failing in the system itself (why are there multiple lines to begin with when organ transport is a solved problem?), but it's not unreasonable to look at somebody exploiting that broken system and question their character.
It's the "at the expense of others" thing that makes it more morally grey, and the chain of cause and effect is short enough that people sometimes get up in arms about it.
For some other actions on some sort of badness scale, we have:
- Murdering people for your spare organs. Parts of China do this (somebody survived and escaped recently, so it's stirred things up a bit). Most people think this is very bad.
- Paying for somebody's organs (similar to prostitution at some level, though banned much more frequently than sex work -- if society is structurally so unequal that sacrificing part of your life for a pittance is actually attractive, that reflects poorly on that society, and we try to ban.the rich and powerful from using that power to create scenarios more like my first point).
- What Jobs did. It's technically legal, but he necessarily got an organ before somebody else for no other reason than that he had money. Did that somebody else survive? Who knows. If you factor in that it was actually many people who were displaced, did all of them survive? Unlikely. Organ donations are already fraught with ethical issues and strongly held convictions, and I'm not at all surprised that a number of people would be upset at this.
What’s the point of making a moral judgment about a bit of human nature that literally everyone in earth shares? It doesn’t make you or me superior to condemn it; we would do the same. So… what does “bad” even mean in this context?
Very many people don’t. We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them. We are part of a society that enables us to be what we are, why should we strive to give as little as possible in return?
(And yes, we also don’t send extra money. This is not a contradiction.)
> We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them.
Only because you don't want to put the effort in to pursuing it. If I told you you could reduce your tax bill by 20% by spinning round in your chair one time I doubt you (or anyone else) would decline.
Every entity generally seeks to take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. Individuals are generally a little less extreme, in my experience, with corporations being the worst.
My taxes are not a burden on me. While on the other hand, the local politicians have sought tax cut after tax cut, causing the library to limit services, the schools to cut down on teaching staff, infrastructure maintenance delays, less funding for local social services and city events, and more.
My paying an extra 20% wouldn't fix things, as adding to the general budget would end up simply reducing taxes further, instead of everyone sharing the load.
I hate that I've starting getting involved with local politics. I would rather code.
Or, following your self-centric analysis, I would put the effort into raising my taxes by 20% since the collective benefits give me much more than what I can do individually.
There are multiple lines because when an organ comes up, it can only last so long, so a person needs to be able to get to the hospital without a certain period of time. Usually this means driving distance. When you have a private plane, the distance expands. The organ still goes to the most sick person in line, not the one with the most money.
I was at a talk with Martine Rothblatt several years back, who created a startup for 3D printed organs. They ended up also building electric helicopters to transport those organs, because the transportation bottleneck was a huge issue.
I try not to judges peoples character when they’re looking death in the face. No one really knows what they’ll do in that scenario. Most people who can save their own life will. This was the premise of the movie SAW… how far are you willing to go to save your own life? How strong is your survival instinct? Most people are never tested, and it’s easy to sit back and judge, but would you just sit back and die? How do we even know there was someone else in line behind Jobs? It could be that he got an organ that would have otherwise been wasted.
Pancreatic cancer is known for being incurable, even in the best of circumstances, early diagnose or not. Having witnessed a family member go through the same thing, I understand Jobs's reaction of trying literally anything else.
Well, given apparently the posts in this thread reveal me to be an "manic crazy person" (or such I inferred) - I suppose I'll add to it then by saying: I too have read and understood Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra. I hadn't thought much about it till today, but, I suspect, will do as Steve did. :) :)
Jobs was more than a tech billionaire. He was someone who had refined personal taste and stood on values and was willing to do what it took to see them through, despite the friction.
And the outcome was a computing company that was waaaay less mediocre than 99% of these other memetic, mediocre gradient-descent chasing privacy-abusing, ad-supported companies.
Apple has raised the bar so high. And the DNA of what is manifesting is Steve’s insistence and vision followed by Tim’s clarity of execution.
Look at the Apple Architecture moves. They got Intel’s hot, slow CPUs out of the device. And replaced them with excellent, quiet, fast, efficient CPUs, with UMA and great features.
It’s hard to nail every detail when you have the surface area of Apple 2025. A huge huge company with billions of users and dozens of device families and services. But the bar is high for most of what they do.
I think of Apple like I think of Disney: _consistently good_ products. Maybe not the best in all the things all the times, and some duds from time to time, but if you blindly hit "play" on a Disney movie you're going to be watching something at least pretty good.
It's not just about the products themselves, but the philosophy behind them. He had this relentless obsession with making technology feel right (it is all from my perspective)
I could easily be wrong about this but I don't believe Jobs or anyone else at Jobs-era Apple became a billionaire because of it. Because of early infighting/getting fired, ownership was too dispersed for that.
He became a billionaire because Disney bought Pixar.
Jobs also said a lot of things that still resonate with me. Recently Apple introduced a "classic Mac" screensaver that shows how carefully designed the original Mac GUI was. I'm sure nobody misses the days when app bugs could crash the OS, but I wish Apple were as obsessive now about detail now as they were back then.