Steve Jobs

A damned good read....

First and foremost, this is just a good read. I found that Isaacson's bio of Einstein was both interesting and did a profoundly better job of explaining relativity than my physics professors ever did. This book didn't disappoint. It was both captivating, and offered meaningful insight into Steve Jobs and the history of Apple. On way of my own biases, I was an Apple bigot before being an Apple bigot was cool. I learned to program on an Apple II that my father brought home in 1980. I've been a shareholder since I was given a single share of Apple stock for my bar mitzvah in 1981. I later grew up using Macs in college for everything from writing papers to digital circuit simulation to writing shareware apps that paid off debt I had accumulated as a starving grad student and provided the down payment on my first home. I even continued to use a Mac (eventually a PowerPC clone) as my exclusive home computer during most of my tenure with IBM! But around 1998-99, I finally gave up on Macs and bought my first PC. By then I had concluded that Windows hadn't simply caught up, but in many regards had surpassed the Mac. Mac had become a lesser computer that cost a premium, for which applications were fewer in number, and cost more. Even after Apple finally made substantial improvements and moved to a Unix kernel, I've never been tempted to look back. What's more, as Apple entered the consumer electronics domain and began producing closed devices and systems characterized by excessive proprietary control, I developed a decidedly anti-Apple viewpoint. Not a reflexive anti-Apple bias -- I did eventually start using a hand-me-down iPod when my daughter just had to upgrade to a iTouch. And we eventually all got iPhones after I concluded that, whatever it's limitations, it was still a better option than the available Android alternatives. But you get the point -- I'm now closer to being an anti-Apple bigot than one of the hordes of Apple fans. This book provides real insight into w...