Minutes before the launch of Macintosh, Jobs’ first end-to-end protected computer device like he always wanted, Steve Wozniak, his old-times buddy together with whom Jobs started on their journey, comes to visit him backstage. Woz wanted Jobs to acknowledge the Apple II team, which they had produced together and which was also earning 70% of the Apple company’s revenue. Steve stubbornly refused Woz’s pleading request for honor and his team, for Steve dismissed Apple II’s worth and hated its open-ended system. Yet Steve didn’t know how to code, so he hadn’t, at all, built anything of Apple II, and Woz is forced to bring that up: ‘You don’t know how to write code, you don’t know how to build computers, what did you really do?’ And Steve answers: ‘I play the Orchestra’.
Something Jobs had learned on his recent visit to Japan: that while each of the instrument players is expert in their job and collectively important, they only play their distinct instrument – the one performing the score however, he plays them all – he plays the Orchestra.
A lot can be deciphered about Jobs through this single orchestra, which by the is evident throughout both the book and the movie. Jobs is frustrating person; he’s rude, stubborn, uncooperative, dismissive of others, buoyant about himself, a distorter to reality, a mostly awful parent, a self-involved maniac, bitterly sarcastic, and so on – but he’s also one thing that gave always him the free pass: a genius. His genius was, in words of his wife Lauren, ‘an epic sense of possibility’. ‘Steve was never a really captive of reality’, she said.
But while Jobs’ reality distorting ideas did help him imagine and create a future of personalized computers, the age of which we are living in, and while he really might’ve put ‘a dent in the universe’ as he so wanted to, both his circumstances and the people around him enabled him to significant degrees in making it all a reality. Where it not the booming era of computer needs, the early rise of the internet, the dot.com boom, and the sheer investing that went into creating that future, Jobs, Apple, and their legacy wouldn’t have been possible. More importantly however, the people, who so miserably and sufferingly at times, put with Jobs’ highly indecent behavior and offered him their equally as genius and capable skills, be it Steve Wozniak, Andy Herzfeld, or John Scully, into making Steve’s ‘epic possibilities’ into reality, it wouldn’t have been possible without them either.
Yet again, Jobs’ confidence, imagination, and bluntness created a blue-print of computer’s future on one hand, and on the other his stubbornness and intensity made him dominant to even force that future into reality. It is fortunate enough for everyone to have access to capable tools, but only a few people make exceptional use of them.
Isaacson’s thick book, which he has portioned into forty-two small chapters to make reader-friendly, gives a wholesome account of Jobs’ life; not only his numerous creations: Apple computers, NeXT, Macintosh, Pixar, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but also his life spent in making these progressive products in which he always tried to represent himself. Being abandoned by his biological parents and adopted by another, Jobs always dealt with the perspective of seeing himself as either ‘rejected’ or ‘chosen’, as John Scully, himself like a father figure, puts it. It instilled himself the chronic desire for ‘control’. Isaacson also aptly retells Jobs’ dropping out of college and his involvement in Buddhism during his adolescent years.
Yet Boyle’s movie, while on the shorter side, set only in-between three launches ‘Macintosh, NeXT, and iMac’, brilliantly captures the gest of who Jobs was and his genius endured at the expense of him being an ‘asshole’. This biography was meant to be a visual one, and director Boyle does a great job of putting Isaacson’s successful book on the screen.
Ratings: 4/5 Feb 8, 2022_