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Review: Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs'

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<img alt="" class="aligncenter" height="199" mce_src="http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/4388/jobsbiography1026.jpg" src="http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/4388/jobsbiography1026.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; height: 332px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 8px; max-width: 640px; width: 225px;" width="135" />I've just finished a marathon session of reading all the way through<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/steve-jobs/id431617578?mt=11" mce_href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/steve-jobs/id431617578?mt=11" style="color: #0066cc; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5;">Steve Jobs</a> on my iPad -- and I'm sure Jobs would have appreciated the odd harmony of people reading his life story on a device he helped create.</div>
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After reading his biography, I'm no longer convinced that Steve Jobs would have liked me if we'd ever met in person. At least not at first. More likely, he'd have torn me a new one in our first meeting and told me that I sucked and everything I did was worthless. Then, in our second meeting, he'd have parroted my ideas back at me as though they were his own. It was apparently one of his signature moves, and it probably would have made me want to throw a chair at him.</div>
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But even if I had been provoked that far, he most likely would have just bellowed that I should have thrown a better chair.</div>
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Reading biographies is perhaps a different experience for me than it is for most people, since I spent most of my Master's thesis examining the concept of truth in biographical works. Most of the memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies I've read have fallen into one of two categories. Either the text was something designed to lionize its subject and make him or her seem larger than life, or else the writer had taken pains to focus on only the parts of the subject's life that fit into a clean narrative arc while leaving everything else on the cutting room floor, an approach that leads to easy and almost cinematic storytelling but leaves out much of the facts.</div>
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Neither approach to biographical writing strikes me as particularly true; in fact, almost every biography I've read seems to contain about as much actual truth as an episode of Star Trek. The tendency to over-praise or over-dramatize is both pernicious and pervasive throughout the various forms of biographical texts.</div>
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Walter Isaacson's 656-page profile of Steve Jobs falls in neither category. It is quite possibly the truest biography I've ever read. In the process of telling the unvarnished truth about Steve Jobs, it dispels much of the myth and magic surrounding the man and his legacy. It does not depict Steve Jobs as the information age's equivalent of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with an iPad in each hand. It would have been easy for some misinformed hack to portray Jobs that way in a quick cash-in "unauthorized" biography soon after Jobs's death, but it also would have been closer to fiction than biography.</div>
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What Isaacson gives us instead is a portrait of a man with keen insight, brilliant powers of observation, and a stubborn determination to "put a dent in the universe." However, the biography also depicts a man with deep flaws, some of which arguably contributed to his early death. It humanizes a man who's spent much of the past decade as a living legend in multiple arenas, and it gives valuable insight into the person Steve Jobs was, not just the icon he became.</div>
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After reading his biography, I get the sense that no matter how brilliant Steve Jobs was or how many fundamental shifts in our landscape he spearheaded, in the end, he was as human as the rest of us. It's a testament to Isaacson's skill as a biographer that readers can at last obtain the picture of Steve Jobs as a human being rather than a legend.</div>
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Jobs's reputation as a control freak was legendary, yet he relinquished all control over the contents of his biography. It's a surprising move from a man who insisted on so much control over all of his life's projects -- the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad were all born and thrived partially because Jobs refused to cede control over them. Jobs explained his motivations to Isaacson for his atypically hands-off approach to the biography. Partially it was because he wanted his children to know him better, flaws and all. It was also because he wanted to make sure that only someone possessed of all the facts about his life would write his story. "When I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn't know anything. They'd get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say."</div>
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Jobs's biography manages to allow him to get the last word in many debates. Many of the people who have toasted both him and his achievements will find themselves bearing the brunt of his last barbs against them. Some, like Jobs threatening to go "thermonuclear" on Android, have already been outed. Others are a bit more deeply buried within the text, but once found they're both candid and a bit stunning.</div>
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"IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst," Jobs said, reminiscing about the early days of the personal computer revolution. "They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like AT&T or Microsoft or Google is." My jaw dropped at this quote, but another later on in the book was more alarming. Immediately after heaping praise on his successor, Tim Cook, Steve said, "Tim's not a product person, per se." Considering that at many other points in the book Jobs heaped scorn on people like Bill Gates or John Sculley whom he also considered more concerned with profits than product quality, his unfiltered opinion of Cook's product sensibilities definitely raised an eyebrow.</div>
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Much of the biography will be familiar to hardcore Apple enthusiasts. Chapters on the birth of the Macintosh will be familiar to anyone who's read Andy Hertzfeld's recollections at folklore.org, and if you're a regular TUAW reader there won't be too much in the chapters about the iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you haven't already read. Older Apple fans will likely find the earliest chapters about the founding days of Apple not much more than a refresher course. But I suspect that few people will be able to read the entire book andnot discover some surprising fact about Steve Jobs that they didn't already know.</div>
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If you come into Steve Jobs already hating him, the biography gives you plenty of reasons to hold onto that opinion. If instead you view Jobs as a personal hero, there are plenty of episodes within his life story that might make you reconsider that opinion. Isaacson doesn't shy away from describing Steve Jobs's darker moments or personality deficiencies, some of which border on the downright despicable. To put it lightly, Steve Jobs was not a "people person."</div>
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One of his ex-girlfriends read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the DSM and said, "It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see." Even his closest friends, like Apple design guru Jonathan Ive, noted that Jobs often exhibited a vicious and unnecessary lack of empathy for those around him. The fact that so many people all over the world have been lauding him since his death, both friends and dogged competitors, speaks to the complex and paradoxical nature of Steve Jobs, a man whose greatest goal was to establish empathy between people and technology but who often displayed precious little empathy of his own.</div>
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Isaacson's biography of Jobs isn't a character assassination by any means (though I do wonder why the first third of the book dwells so often on Jobs's body odor during the 1970s). That said, I still feel terrifically sorry for any employees who find themselves at the mercy of a supervisor who uses Steve Jobs as a managerial handbook, just like the legions of young would-be entrepreneurs trying to emulate the callous Mark Zuckerberg they saw in The Social Network.</div>
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If anyone comes away from reading Steve Jobs thinking that being a leader makes it okay to be an asshole, they'll have missed about 99 percent of the point. Anyone can cut an employee to shreds or throw epic temper tantrums at the slightest provocation, but replicating Jobs's intuition, perfectionism, dedication, and vision is arguably something that only one person in seven billion can manage to pull off.</div>
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Steve Jobs is at its core the study of the man himself, but along the way it's also a fascinating history of the genesis, near-death, and resurgence of Apple. It also describes the birth, near-death, and ascendancy of Pixar, with fascinating details I've never read before. As the book follows Jobs through the personal computer revolution, the birth of the Macintosh, his "wilderness years" at NeXT and Pixar, and his return to Apple and subsequent paving over of the landscape for the music industry, cell phones, and tablet computing, Steve Jobs's biography also offers incredibly detailed insights into how our world shifted from the hobbyist computing era of the mid-'70s to the ubiquitous techscape we live in today. Steve Jobs didn't enact any of these revolutionary changes singlehandedly -- his biography takes pains to make that clear -- but he was most assuredly at or near the center of all of them.</div>
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Though the book makes his flaws obvious to readers, it also makes clear that we would be living in a very different world if Steve Jobs hadn't set out to put a dent in the universe. Anyone with even a passing interest in Apple's history, and anyone who's ever wondered how so very much about the technology landscape has changed so fundamentally in just 35 years, owes it to themselves to read this book.</div>
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Review: Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs'

I've just finished a marathon session of reading all the way through Steve Jobs on my iPad -- and I'm sure Jobs would have appr...

Pentax Q gets official: release date, specs

Pentax has unveiled what it claims to be the world's lightest and smallest digital interchangeable lens system camera, the Pentax Q. Among the Pentax Q's key features are 12.4-million-pixel resolution, Full HD video recording and high-speed continuous shooting at a maximum speed of 5fps. In its magnesium-alloy body, the Pentax Q also boasts a maximum sensitivity of ISO 6400 and will be compatible with a new range of super-compact Pentax Q-mount lenses which are proportioned to the Pentax Q's compact CMOS image sensor. Like its sibling DSLRs, the Pentax Q is equipped with anti-dust and Shake Reduction mechanisms, as well as a multi-mode exposure system including the Aperture-Priority AE mode and a custom image function. The Pentax Q also offers a bokeh control function to adjust the intensity of the out-of-focus effect around a subject, and a creative Smart Effect function to give pictures effects such as that of cross-processing film. It's worth noting that the Pentax Q's 1/2.3-inch CMOS sensor is smaller than the sensors in premium compact cameras, such as the Olympus XZ-1, which boasts a 1/1.63-inch CCD unit. Effectively, it appears that Pentax has produced an advanced-level compact camera that accepts interchangeable lenses. It will be interesting to see when samples are available closer to the Pentax Q UK release date in mid-September 2011 how the Pentax Q image quality compares to other mirrorless compact system cameras, and versus enthusiast-level compacts. Pentax Q price information has not yet been made available. Type Lens-interchangeable SL digital-still camera Lens Mount PENTAX bayonet Q-mount Compatible Lens Q-mount lenses Image Capture Unit Image Sensor Type: CMOS sensor with a primary colour filter, Size: 1/2.3-inch Effective Pixels Approx. 12.4 megapixels Total Pixels Approx. 12.75 megapixels Dust Removal Image sensor cleaning using ultrasonic vibrations "DR II" Sensitivity (Standard Output) AUTO: ISO 125 to 6400 (1/3 EV steps) Bulb mode: up to ISO 1600 Image Stabilizer Sensor shift Shake Reduction File Formats File Format RAW (DNG), JPEG (Exif 2.3), DCF2.0 compliant Recorded Pixels [4:3] 12M (4000x3000), 9M (3456x2592), 5M (2688x2016), 3M (1920x1440) [3:2] 10M (4000x2664), 8M (3456x2304), 5M (2688x1792), 2M (1920x1280) [16:9] 9M (4000x2248), 6M (3456x1944), 4M (2688x1512), 2M(1920x1080) [1:1] 9M (2992x2992), 6M (2592x2592), 4M (2016x2016), 2M (1440x1440) [4:3] 12M (4000x3000) Quality Level RAW (12bit): DNG JPEG: *** (Best), ** (Better), * (Good) RAW and JPEG simultaneously recordable Color Space sRGB, AdobeRGB Storage Medium SD, SDHC, and SDXC Memory Card Storage Folder Date (100_1018, 100_1019...)/PENTX (100PENTX, 101PENTX...) LCD Monitor Type TFT colour LCD monitor, wide angle viewing Size 3.0 inches Dots Approx. 460,000 dots Adjustment Brightness and colours adjustable Display Field of View: approx. 100%, Grid display (4x4 Grid, Golden Section, Scale display), Bright/dark area warning, Histogram White Balance Auto TTL by CMOS image sensor Preset Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Fluorescent Light (D:Daylight Colour, N:Daylight White, W:Cool White, L:Warm White), Tungsten, Flash, CTE, Manual Manual Configuration on monitor Fine Adjustment Adjustable ±7 steps on A-B axis or G-M axis Autofocus System Type Contrast detection AF Brightness Range EV1 to 18（ISO125) Focus Method AF/MF switching Autofocus Method Face Detection, Tracking, AF Select (25 Points), Select, Spot AF Assist Light Dedicated LED AF assist light MF Assist OFF/ｘ2/ｘ4 Metering Type TTL image sensor metering, segment metering, centre-weighted metering, and spot metering Exposure Compensation EV1.3 - 17 (ISO 125, F1.9 lens), +2EV using the Electronic Shutter setting or using the ND filter Exposure Modes Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Night Scene Portrait, Night Scene, Blue Sky, Forest Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Moving Object, Night Scene Portrait, Sunset, Blue Sky, Night Scene, Night Scene HDR*, Night Snap, Food, Quick Macro*, Pet, Kids, Forest, Surf & Snow, HDR*, Backlight Silhouette, Candlelight, Stage Lighting, Museum, Program, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, Manual, Bulb, Blur Control* *JPEG only EV Compensation ± 3EV (1/3EV step) AE Lock Can be assigned to the green/delete button from the menu. Continuous as long as the shutter release button is pressed halfway. Shutter Lens shutter: 1/2000 - 30 seconds (1/3EV step, 1/8000 - 30 seconds when Electronic Shutter setting is enabled), Bulb *Shooting at 1/8000 - 2 seconds with Electronic Shutter and Bulb shooting are not available when using a lens that has no lens shutter. Aperture From wide open to F8 *Not available when using a lens that has no lens shutter. ND Filter Off/On *Not available when using a lens that has no lens shutter. Drive Modes Mode Selection Single frame, Continuous (Hi, Lo), Self-timer (12s, 2s), Remote Control (0 sec., 3 sec., continuous), Auto Bracketing (3 frames, remote control) Continuous Shooting Approx. 5 fps, JPEG (12M / *** / Continuous Hi): up to 5 frames, Approx. 1.5 fps, JPEG (12M / *** / Continuous Lo): up to 100 frames Built-in Flash Built-in Flash Built-in retractable P-TTL flash Guide number: approx. 5.6 (ISO125/m) / approx. 7 (ISO200/m) Angle of view: coverage: wide angle-lens, equivalent to 28mm in 35mm format Flash Modes P-TTL, Red-eye Reduction, Slow-speed Sync, Trailing Curtain Sync Sync Speed Lens shutter: 1/2000 seconds, Electronic shutter: 1/13 seconds Flash Exposure Compensation –2.0 to +1.0 EV Capture Functions Custom Image Bright, Natural, Portrait, Landscape, Vibrant, Radiant, Muted, Bleach Bypass, Reversal Film, Monochrome, Cross Processing Noise Reduction High-ISO NR Dynamic Range Setting Highlight Correction, Shadow Correction Lens Correction Distortion Correction Digital Filter Toy Camera, High Contrast, Shading, Slim, HDR, Invert Colour, Extract Colour, Colour, Water Colour, Posterization, Fish-eye HDR Capture Auto, HDR 1, HDR 2 Multi-exposure Number of shots: 2-9, Exposure adjusted automatically. Interval Shooting Shooting interval: 1 sec. to 24 hr., Start Interval setting: immediately from the set time, Number of shots: up to 999 images Smart Effect Brilliant Color, Unicolour Bold, Vintage Colour, Cross Processing, Warm Fade, Tone Expansion, Bold Monochrome, Water Colour, Vibrant Colour Enhance, USER 1 to 3 Movie File Format MPEG–4 AVC/H.264 Recorded Pixels Full HD (1920x1080, 16:9, 30fps), HD (1280x720, 16:9, 30fps), VGA (640x480, 4:3, 30fps) Quality Level ***(Best), **(Better), *(Good) Sound Built-in monaural microphone Recording Time Up to 25 minutes; automatically stops recording if the internal temperature of the camera becomes high. Custom Image Bright, Natural, Portrait, Landscape, Vibrant, Radiant, Muted, Bleach Bypass, Reversal Film, Monochrome, Cross Processing Digital Filter Toy Camera, High Contrast, Shading, Slim, HDR, Invert Colour, Extract Colour, Colour, Water Colour, Posterization, Fish-eye Interval Movie Recording interval: 1 sec., 5 sec., 10 sec., 30 sec., 1 min., 5 min., 10 min., 30 min., 1 hr., Recording time: 5 sec. to 99 hr. Start Interval setting: immediately, from the set time Playback Functions Playback View Single frame, image comparison, multi-image display (4, 9, 20, 42, 90 segmentation), display magnification (up to 16x, scrolling and quick magnification available), rotating, histogram (Y histogram, RGB histogram), bright/dark area warning, detailed information display, folder display, calendar display, slideshow Delete Delete single image, delete all images, select & delete, delete folder, delete instant review image Digital Filter Monochrome, Toy Camera, High Contrast, Shading, Slim, HDR, Invert Colour, Extract Colour, Colour, Water Colour, Posterization, Fish-eye, Retro, Soft, Sketch Filter, Miniature, Frame Composite, Starburst, Base Parameter Adjustment RAW Development File Format (JPEG), Aspect Ratio, Colour Space, Custom Image, White Balance, Sensitivity, High-ISO NR, Shadow Correction, Distortion Correction Edit Resize, Cropping (aspect ratio adjustment available), Index, Movie Editing (divide or delete selected frames), Capturing a JPEG still picture from a movie, Red-eye Edit, Saving buffer as a RAW file Customization Custom Functions 13 items Mode Memory 12 items Button/ Dial Customization Green/Delete button: Green Button, Preview, One Push File Format, AE Lock, Enable AF Quick Dial: Smart Effect, Custom Image, Digital Filter, Aspect Ratio World Time World Time settings for 75 cities (28 time zones) Language English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, Russian, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese Power Supply Battery Type Rechargeable Lithium-ion Battery D-LI68 AC Adapter AC Adapter Kit K-AC115 (optional) Battery Life Number of recordable images: approx. 230 images (with 50% flash usage), approx. 250 images (without flash usage) Playback time: approx. 160 minutes * Using a new lithium-ion battery under the temperature at 23 °C, Tested in compliance with CIPA standard. Actual results may vary depending on the shooting conditions/circumstances. Interfaces Connection Port USB 2.0 (high-speed compatible) / AV output terminal, HDMI output terminal (Type D) USB Connection MSC/PTP Video Output Format NTSC/PAL Dimensions and Weight Dimensions Approx. 98.0mm (W) x 57.5mm (H) x 31.0mm (D) (excluding the operation parts and protrusion) Weight Approx. 200g (loaded and ready with the dedicated battery and SD Memory Card), Approx. 180 g (body only) Accessories Package Contents USB Cable I-USB7, Strap O-ST115, Rechargeable Lithium-ion Battery D-LI68, Battery Charger D-BC68P, Software (CDROM) S-SW115 Hot shoe cover FK, Body mount cover Software SILKYPIX Developer Studio 3.0 for PENTAX

Pentax Q gets official: release date, specs

Pentax has unveiled what it claims to be the world's lightest and smallest digital interchangeable lens system camera, the Pentax Q. Amo...