Steve Jobs
By Walter Isaacson
(Simon & Schuster, 627 pp., $35)
I.
In 2010, Der Spiegel published a glowing profile of Steve Jobs, then at the helm of Apple. Jobs’s products are venerated in Germany, especially by young bohemian types. Recently, the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg presented an exhibition of Apple’s products, with the grandiloquent subtitle “On Electro-Design that Makes History”—a good indication of the country’s infatuation with the company. Jobs and Jony Ive, Apple’s extraordinary chief of design, have always acknowledged their debt to Braun, a once-mighty German manufacturer of radios, record players, and coffeemakers. The similarity between Braun’s gadgets from the 1960s and Apple’s gadgets is quite uncanny. 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.)
The piece about Jobs in Der Spiegel shed no light on his personality, but it stood out for two reasons. The first was its title: “Der Philosoph des 21 Jahrhunderts,” or “The Philosopher of the Twenty-First Century.” The second was the paucity of evidence to back up such an astonishing claim. Jobs’s status as a philosopher seems to have been self-evident. It is hard to think of any other big-name CEO who could win such an accolade, and from an earnest German magazine that used to publish long interviews with Heidegger. So was Steve Jobs a philosopher who strove to change the world rather than merely interpret it? Or was he a marketing genius who turned an ordinary company into a mythical cult, while he himself was busy settling old scores and serving the demands of his titanic ego?
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?
That the book contains few earth-shattering revelations is not necessarily Isaacson’s fault. Apple-watching is an industry: there exists an apparently insatiable demand for books and articles about the company. Apple-focused blogs regularly brim with rumors and speculation. Ever since its founding—but especially in the last decade, when Apple-worship reached its apogee—Apple has been living under the kind of intense public scrutiny that is usually reserved for presidents. Jobs relished such attention, but only if it came on his own terms. He did his best to manage Apple’s media coverage, and was not above calling influential tech reporters and convincing them to write what he wanted the world to hear. Not only did Jobs build a cult around his company, he also ensured that it had its own print outlets: Apple’s generous subsidy allowed Macworld—the first magazine to cover all things Apple—to come into being and eventually spawn a genre of its own.
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. He hung a pirate flag on the top of his team’s building, proclaiming that “it is better to be a pirate than to join the Navy,” only to condemn Internet piracy as theft several decades later. He waxed lyrical about his love for calligraphy, only to destroy the stylus as an input device. He talked up the virtues of contemplation and meditation, but did everything he could to shorten the time it takes to boot an Apple computer. (For a Buddhist, what’s the rush?) He sought to liberate individual users from the thrall of big businesses such as IBM, and then partnered with IBM and expressed his desire to work only with “corporate America.” A simplifier with ascetic tendencies, he demanded that Apple’s board give him a personal jet so that he could take his family to Hawaii. He claimed he was not in it for the money and asked for a salary of just $1, but he got into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for having his stock options—in a move that gave him millions—backdated. He tried to convince his girlfriend that “it was important to avoid attachment to material objects,” but he built a company that created a fetish out of material objects. He considered going to a monastery in Japan, but declared that, were it not for computers, he would be a poet in the exceedingly unmonastic city of Paris.
How serious was he about that monastery thing? Isaacson recounts well-known anecdotes of Jobs’s quest for spirituality and seems to take them all (and many other things) at face value. The story of Jobs’s youth—his pilgrimage to India, the time he spent living on a farm commune, his fascination with primal scream therapy—does suggest that his interest in spirituality was more than a passing fad. But how long did it last, exactly? Did the more mature Jobs, the ruthless capitalist, feel as strongly about spirituality as his younger self did? Surely there were good reasons for the mature Jobs to cultivate the image of a deeply spiritual person: Buddhism is more than just a religion in America, it is also a brand. And one of Apple’s great accomplishments was to confer upon its devices a kind of spiritual veneer.
Jobs was quite candid about his vanishing interest in matters of spirituality as early as 1985. When a Newsweek reporter inquired if it was true that he had considered going to a monastery in Japan, Jobs gave a frank answer: “I’m glad I didn’t do that. I know this is going to sound really, really corny. But I feel like I’m an American, and I was born here. And the fate of the world is in America’s hands right now. I really feel that. And you know I’m going to live my life here and do what I can to help.” In a more recent interview with Esquire he claimed that he did not pursue the monastery route in part because he saw fewer and fewer differences between living in the East and working at Apple: “Ultimately, it was the same thing.”
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.) When he was ousted from Apple, Jobs may have flirted with the idea of running for office but was probably discouraged by all the pandering it required. “Do we have to go through that political bullshit to get elected governor?” he reportedly asked his publicist. In an interview with Business Week in 1984, he confessed that “I’m not political. I’m not party-oriented, I’m people-oriented.”
But “not political” may be the wrong term to describe him. There is a curious passage in his interview with Wired, in 1996, where he notes:
When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
There is a hint of contempt, even of misanthropy, in this observation; and also of the marketer’s view of the world. Reform as a category of thought did not seem to exist in Steve Jobs’s universe, even if he was always tweaking his products. That an entirely different institutional and political arrangement might be possible; that it might result in better television; that this new kind of television might still be enjoyed by the population and play an important civic role in the national discourse—none of this occurred to him. Had he only bothered to look across the Atlantic, he would have discovered that a different television—the BBC, or the Franco-German Arte—was not only possible, but attainable. Jobs claimed to have liberal leanings, but he chose to live in an intellectual bubble that was decidedly pre-political. In that bubble, there were only two kinds of people to be reckoned with: producers and consumers. Norms, laws, institutions, politics—none of that larger context matters. Jobs was a revolutionary, but a limited one; and never did so limited a revolutionary create so vast a revolution.
II.
“PURE” WAS THE ultimate compliment that Steve Jobs could bestow. The word and its derivations appear often in Isaacson’s book. “Every once in a while,” says Jobs, “I find myself in the presence of purity—purity of spirit and love—and I always cry.” For Jobs, ideas and products either have purity—and then they are superior to everything else—or they do not, and then they must be rejected or revised. He wants Apple computers to be “bright and pure and honest.” He orders the walls of an Apple factory to be painted “pure white.” The iPad, he says, must embody “the purest possible simplicity.” He is deeply moved by “artists who displayed purity,” and describes an ex-girlfriend as “one of the purest people I’ve ever known.” Apple, he claimed in 1985, “was about as pure of a Silicon Valley company as you could imagine.” Ive, Apple’s master of design, loves purity as well. He wants his devices not in plain white but in “pure white,” because “there would be a purity to it.” A clear coating on the iPod nano would ruin “the purity of his design.” Ive believes—and says that Jobs shared this belief—that products need to look “pure and seamless.”
Neither Jobs nor Ive tells us exactly what he means by “pure,” and Isaacson is not much help here. It appears that “pure” products exhibit a perfect correspondence between their form and what both Jobs and Ive refer to as their “essence.” Ive notes that “we don’t like to think of our knives as being glued together. Steve and I care about things like that, which ruin the purity and detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think alike about how products should be made to look pure and seamless.” It is a kind of industrial Platonism. All knives have an essence, and if the form of a given knife corresponds to that essence, then the knife, the designed object, is perfect, or pure. Nothing compound or cobbled together; only the integrity of a single substance in a simple form. Pure products are born, not made; any visible signs of human assembly—say, screws—would make it hard to believe in the higher integrity, the perfection, of the product.
Isaacson’s discussion of the idea behind Toy Story—the wildly successful computeranimated film that was made in 1995 by Pixar, then run by Jobs—provides a further glimpse into how Jobs thought about essences. Jobs and John Lasseter, the film’s director, shared a belief that
products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water.... The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human. The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys.
But Isaacson’s equation of “essences” with “purposes” only complicates matters further, since products can be made for purposes that have nothing to do with their essences. (Toys can be made for the purpose of making money.) Later Isaacson writes that “as usual Jobs pushed for the purest possible simplicity. That required determining what was the core essence of the [iPad]. The answer: the display screen.” But by this logic, the essence of a unicycle is the wheel rather than being ridden in a circus, as Isaacson himself claims above.
I DO NOT MEAN to be pedantic. The question of essence and form, of purity and design, may seem abstract and obscure, but it lies at the heart of the Apple ethos. Apple’s metaphysics, as it might be called, did not originate in religion, but rather in architecture and design. It’s these two disciplines that supplied Jobs with his intellectual ambition. John Sculley, Apple’s former CEO, who ousted Jobs from his own company in the mid-1980s, maintained that “everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.” You cannot grasp how Apple thinks about the world—and about its own role in the world—without engaging with its design philosophy.
Isaacson gets closer to the heart of the matter when he discusses Jobs’s interest in the Bauhaus, as well as his and Ive’s obsession with Braun, but he does not push this line of inquiry far enough. Nor does he ask an obvious philosophical question: since essences do not drop from the sky, where do they come from? How can a non-existent product—say, the iPad—have an essence that can be discovered and then implemented in form? Is the iPad’s essence something that was dreamed up by Jobs and Ive, or does it exist independently of them in some kind of empyrean that they—by training or by visionary intuition—uniquely inhabit?
The idea that the form of a product should correspond to its essence does not simply mean that products should be designed with their intended use in mind. That a knife needs to be sharp so as to cut things is a non-controversial point accepted by most designers. The notion of essence as invoked by Jobs and Ive is more interesting and significant—more intellectually ambitious—because it is linked to the ideal of purity. No matter how trivial the object, there is nothing trivial about the pursuit of perfection. On closer analysis, the testimonies of both Jobs and Ive suggest that they did see essences existing independently of the designer—a position that is hard for a modern secular mind to accept, because it is, if not religious, then, as I say, startlingly Platonic.
This is where Apple’s intellectual patrimony—which spans the Bauhaus, its postwar successor in the Ulm School of Design, and Braun (Ulm’s closest collaborator in the corporate world)—comes into play. Those modernist institutions proclaimed and