He's most certainly an important historical figure of our time, but for some reason we are still stuck with the 10 yr-old hagiography from Walter Isaacson (which is ok-ish but feels rushed out, and was commissioned by Jobs himself).
Do you know of any other good, serious Steve Jobs biography?
Essentially, I think Woz would have gone on to make a name for himself with or without Jobs. Jobs on the other hand, probably would have been a nobody without Woz.
Remember back to pre iPhone days. Each carrier had their own version of the phone. That phone came with bloatware and a curated list of possible apps you may download … from the carrier. The carrier had total control and say of the phone, it’s functionality and the apps installed.
Imagine a world today where the phone App Store and phone function itself was controlled by the carrier. The carrier dictates if Uber or Lyft is available to “their” customers. Only certain banks or restaurants are available based upon agreements with the carriers.The carrier picks the winners and losers in this new mobile economy and the world is fragmented based upon your cell phone carrier.
Things we take for granted like maps, messaging and FaceTime would be additional costs you pay to the carrier.
Because of Steve Jobs and his vision, that dystopian carrier controlled world does not exist. The new mobile and gig economy is all because Steve Jobs had the vision to wrestle control from the carriers. Name one other person in the last 50 years that has had this much effect on the world and how society has changed.
* https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/03/02/becoming-steve-...
Gruber's review of Isaacson's book:
> Note that my complaints here are not about Isaacson being insufficiently deferential. That the book is not a hagiography is to its credit. The personal stuff — documentation of Jobs’s cruelty (and his talent for cruelty), his tantrums, his tendency to claim for himself the ideas of others — that’s not problematic. Isaacson handles that well, and what he reports in that regard jibes with everything we know about the man. My complaints are about outright technical inaccuracies, and getting the man’s work wrong. The design process, the resulting products, the centrality of software — Isaacson simply misses the boat.
* https://daringfireball.net/2012/02/walter_isaacson_steve_job...
On consideration, I’d really like to know more about ‘97 to ‘07. You’ve got Jobs rejoining Apple, creation of iMac, moving to Intel processors, creation of the iPod, creation of the Apple stores, culminating with the creation of the iPhone. Those ten years with some incredibly gutsy decisions did change society. But I’d want this theoretical book to be about many more people, not just Jobs.
Here’s one from one of the original Mac engineers, Bill Atkinson: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
https://www.booktopia.com.au/small-fry-lisa-brennan-jobs/boo...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extraordinary-Life-Steve-Jobs-Lives...
Is he actually though? He was really wealthy, and sold a lot of mobile devices.
He was fanboyed over by a lot of mobile device enthusiasts.
Of note outside of this - he was a horrible person to work with, and died in large part of lala land medical thinking.
Is this what an important historical figure is these days?
Historical figures are typically more than just grease in the profit engine of a multinational.
IMHO, when the iPhone came out, it did not introduce almost anything revolutionary over the already available Windows Mobile PDA devices, it only simplified, polished and packaged the device way better. I still do not understand how Microsoft, considering their extensive experience in operating system development, somehow managed to lose their entire, massive mobile device market share in the course of only a couple of years. All it could have taken for Microsoft to win over Apple was to switch Windows Mobile from a cumbersome stylus-based UI to a convenient touch-based UI without wasting years and years to re-develop the misguided Windows Phone from scratch.
According to what metric?
I wouldn't call him that. He's in second/third leaguer at best. His impact on the world was minor. He deserves biographies for sure (people with much less accomplishments get them as well), but let's not compare him to his contemporaries who were truly important historical figures of that time, like Nelson Mandela or Lech Wałęsa - people who radically changed lives of tens of millions of people.
In general, impact made by individual businesspeople is not that great, because all they do is follow market trends, which makes them fungible -i.e. if Jobs didn't push Apple to make iPhone, some other company would come up with the smartphone later on (the next step in technical/scientific progress is a logical consequence of the previous steps and is usually spotted by multiple companies/people at the same time).
Whereas in politics, the world is not an unidirectional march towards more progress, and, depending on actual leaders, things can get much better or much worse. So, a given leader makes much more of a difference. For example, if Hitler didn't want German race to dominate the world and didn't start WWII, tens millions of people would not have died - that's a huge impact in comparison. The Nazi party and even WWII could still happen without Hitler existing (somebody else might start the party to harvest all the German resentment of that period), but perhaps he'd be less rabid than Hitler, which would result in much less death - hence the actual delta of Hitler is huge. Even deltas of vanilla American presidents are much greater than Jobs'.
He was an asshole, so vain that he would get a new car every X number of months just so that he could be the guy without license plates, and so selfish he wouldn't give one of those dozens of cars to his daughter whom he refused to acknowledge.
So he made popular products, big deal.
What a disgusting human being he was.