The definitive biography of Apple's co-founder, written with Jobs' full cooperation but not his editorial control. Isaacson conducted over forty interviews with Jobs over two years, plus hundreds more with family, friends, competitors, and colleagues.
What emerges is a portrait of someone whose reality distortion field was both his superpower and his blind spot. The same intensity that produced the Mac, Pixar, the iPod, and the iPhone also produced cruelty toward the people closest to him.
The book is at its best when tracing the connection between Jobs' aesthetic sensibilities and his business decisions. The insistence on controlling hardware and software together, the obsession with packaging, the refusal to ship anything that wasn't beautiful—these weren't vanity. They were a coherent philosophy about what technology should feel like.