Steve Jobs RIP 1955-2011

The ebook of the bio leaked and is number one on the what.cd top ten o_O

Interesting take:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/opinion/nocera-the-biographers-dilemma.html

I'm about 2/3rds of the way though this bio, and I don't think they really need to vilify Jobs to have him come off as manipulative, overly emotional, and mercurial. He's called all these things, and more, throughout the book. One of his exes flat-out claims that she thinks he had may have had narcissistic personality disorder!

Oh, it also quotes people soooo many times saying that he smelled bad

iStink #hereallweek

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/10/25/steve_jobs_and_barack_obama_the_angry_years.html

Jobs tried to focus on a positive policy idea, and let "any foreign student who earned an engineering degree" stay in the USA on a visa. Obama pointed out that Republicans had blocked the DREAM Act. "The president is very smart," Jobs tells Isaacson, "but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done. It infuriates me."

Imagine telling the US president "I design computers and YOU are doing it all wrong"

sounds like every other garden variety silicon valley asshole I've ever met

I was gonna say, you don't seem to understand American businessmen AA

There's like a decent magazine interview's worth of direct quotes from Jobs in this book.

There are a couple of telling bits, though ...

Spoilers, I guess

Eg there's a bit where Jobs is near death and they want to put an oxygen mask on him. He was delirious but tried to pull the mask off, saying he hated the design and wanted to see five options to choose from. It's almost self parody and kinda proof how deep he held this stuff.

you just made that detail up right stet

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g33/GeneralissimoFurioso/burns.jpg

I keep reading Ive as I've, it's doing my head in. That said I'm only in as far as the start of chapter 1 because I have exams.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/10/25/steve_jobs_and_barack_obama_the_angry_years.html

Jobs tried to focus on a positive policy idea, and let "any foreign student who earned an engineering degree" stay in the USA on a visa. Obama pointed out that Republicans had blocked the DREAM Act. "The president is very smart," Jobs tells Isaacson, "but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done. It infuriates me."
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 25 October 2011 21:11 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The top comment on that article expands on what was actually said in the book and it puts a completely different slant on things.
(SPOILERS)

The relevant parts that Wiegel oddly left out of this opinion piece:

"Jobs sent Jarrett an email saying it was a bloated list and he had no intention of coming. In fact his health problems had flared anew by then, so he would not have been able to go in any case, as Doerr privately explained to the president."

That's the entire paragraph. Wiegel left off the last (important) line, and then he (Wiegel) wrongly implies that the Washington meeting went on as planned. It didn't. The very next paragraph in the book:

In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama in Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John Chambers, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings...

Jobs, sitting next to the president, kicked off the dinner by saying, “Regardless of our political persuasions, I want you to know that we’re here to do whatever you ask to help our country.” Despite that, the dinner initially became a litany of suggestions of what the president could do for the businesses there. Chambers, for example, pushed a proposal for a repatriation tax holiday that would allow major corporations to avoid tax payments on overseas profits if they brought them back to the United States for investment during a certain period. The president was annoyed, and so was Zuckerberg, who turned to Valerie Jarrett, sitting to his right, and whispered, “We should be talking about what’s important to the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for him?”
Doerr was able to refocus the discussion by calling on everyone to suggest a list of action items. When Jobs’s turn came, he stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the United States should be given a visa to stay in the country. Obama said that could be done only in the context of the “Dream Act,” which would allow illegal aliens who arrived as minors and finished high school to become legal residents—something that the Republicans had blocked. Jobs found this an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis. “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done,” he recalled. “It infuriates me.”
Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. “You can’t find that many in America to hire,” he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could train them. “If you could educate these engineers,” he said, “we could move more manufacturing plants here.” The argument made a strong impression on the president. Two or three times over the next month he told his aides, “We’ve got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about.”
Jobs was pleased that Obama followed up, and they talked by telephone a few times after the meeting. He offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. (He had made the same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential.) “I think political advertising is terrible. I’d love to get Lee Clow out of retirement, and we can come up with great commercials for him,” Jobs told me a few weeks after the dinner. Jobs had been fighting pain all week, but the talk of politics energized him. “Every once in a while, a real ad pro gets involved, the way Hal Riney did with ‘It’s morning in America’ for Reagan’s reelection in 1984. So that’s what I’d like to do for Obama.”

And as for the "hook" about the "one-term presidency" comment? That's actually from earlier in 2010:

"...The meeting actually lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. “You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset.
Jobs offered to put together a group of six or seven CEOs who could really explain the innovation challenges facing America, and the president accepted. So Jobs made a list of people for a Washington meeting to be held in December..."

Something a bit different in tone from what Wiegel wants to have happened.

I remember sometime soon after that dinner meeting Obama mentioned Jobs at a business summit. Paraphrase: "Steve Jobs mentioned the lack of an educated workforce as cause for Apple outsourcing to China, though I suspect cost also played a part in that decision..."

zing

http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/27/the-story-behind-steve-jobs-mercedez-benz-and-its-missing-license-plate/

lollin'

Steve Jobs was not the most considerate individual at Apple, and he had lots of ways to demonstrate that. One of the most obvious was his habit of parking in the handicapped spot of the parking lot - he seemed to think that the blue wheelchair symbol meant that the spot was reserved for the chairman.
Whenever you saw a big Mercedes parked in a handicapped space, you could be sure that it was Steve’s car (actually, it was hard to be sure otherwise, since he also had a habit of removing his license plates). This sometimes caused him trouble, since unknown parties would occasionally retaliate by scratching the car with their keys.

he seemed to think that the blue wheelchair symbol meant that the spot was reserved for the chairman.

ahaha

Why didn't anonymous apple employees call the cops and get it towed over and over again. Would've been hilarious.

California law doesn't require licence plates until a new car is 6 months old. SJ leased a new lookalike silver Benz every 5 1/2 months, so he was legal.

...barely. barely legal.

I'd pay $39.95 for that.

lolol comments section. a seinfeld quote has enraged the scorn of hundreds, and people have somehow seemed to deduce/reinforce their beliefs that steve jobs is an ass b/c he "exploited" the system (despite fact that i don't have a lot of respect for the dude when juxtaposed w/ bill gates)

what kind of asshole basically solicits parking tickets and then decides not to pay them? this guy seems like a crazy nihilist/egotist sometimes.

"sometimes"

THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING

Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. The doctors looked at Powell, puzzled. She was finally able to distract him so they could put on the mask. He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex. He suggested ways it could be designed more simply. "He was very attuned to every nuance of the environment and objects around him, and that drained him," Powell recalled.

my life's goal is to troll that hard

I believe in u

This image makes a lot of sense now.

http://www.clickcommunications.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Young-Steve-Jobs-.gif

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?pagewanted=all

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

that was great.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web. parked in the handicapped spot unrepentantly.

"Why didn't anonymous apple employees call the cops and get it towed over and over again. Would've been hilarious."

i think i read somewhere that old buddy wozniak did just that, and it apparently was hilarious!

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

― James Mitchell, Sunday, October 30, 2011 3:04 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

this was a great obit but can't help that this ending was the textbook definition of bathos

you are criticizing the dude's last words? cold

just saying it didn't work so well to end the piece that way

but you can also think that I am pissing on his gravestone right now, I don't care

calling his life "the piece"? cold

but... it was so artistically done

anyway I don't see what's wrong about ending someone's eulogy with their hopeful last words

context matters: he was being shown exclusive pictures of the iphone 7

I guess if I were writing his eulogy and I had that piece of information available to me I probably wouldn't use it to end the piece because opportunistic ppl on the INTERNET would be able to use it to make fun of him xp

:|

Just noticed daringfireball.net is back to background-color: #4a525a :drudgesirens:

I hadn't been moved by his death till I read that eulogy, and I find OH WOW OH WOW OH WOW pretty great last words. Puts me in mind of "My God, it's full of stars"

If there had been an ugly computer in the room he could have gone the Oscar Wilde route

'oh wow' pretty moving to me.

WOW

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lliylcYtbV1qbg3ylo1_500.gif

i hope if the last thing out of my mouth before i die is something that's barely even words like "oh wow" that people will quote whatever coherent sentence that preceded that as my 'profound last words'