by Walter Isaacson

I consumed this book in the form of a 25-hour audiobook, and it was great! I listened to it while getting ready in the mornings, and on my walks in the evenings, instead of listening to podcasts - listening to podcasts is fun, but it always feels like there’s so much content to keep up with. Exiting the podcast stream to switch to an audiobook was a nice change of pace.

As someone who is fully “inside the Apple ecosystem”, it was great to learn about Job’s early visions and ambitions for Apple products. He had a passion for easy and cohesive user experience and a lust for elegance and simplicity that pushed the computer industry beyond its breaking point on a repeated basis.

He was also a total asshole. Yelled, manipulated, lied, and mistreated people all the time, his whole life.

I learned lots of new things: that he was the CEO of Pixar, that he was a huge bob dylan fan, and that argument like “how many ports should the computer have” or “how do we feel about rectangles with rounded corners” are not just passing budgetary or layout questions for Apple, but are the same things Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have been arguing about since the 70s.

One thing that struck me in this book: the word “minimalism” gets used over and over again as a unifying idea behind Job’s passion and ideology. It’s a hard word to use unequivocally: something as complex and infinitely capable as an iPhone can hardly be considered minimal. And the amount of extraction, exploitation, and waste that the tech industry obliges could certainly not be described as minimal. But Apple’s contribution to the world of minimalist design I totally transformed the tech industry — it’s a discipline that didn’t exist before Apple, and while it’s now ubiquitous across the consumer electronics industry, it’s rare that another company matches the caliber of Apple.