Steve Jobs

About the book

Isaacson wrote this with Jobs's cooperation but without giving him any control over the contents, drawing on more than forty interviews with Jobs and many more with family, colleagues, rivals, and critics. It follows his life and the arc of Apple, Pixar, and NeXT, and the obsession with design and simplicity that ran through all of it.

About the author

Walter Isaacson is a writer and former editor of Time and head of CNN. He has also written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Key ideas

• Design is how it works, not just how it looks. Simplicity came from understanding a product deeply, not from stripping it down.
• The reality distortion field pushed people past what they believed possible, which produced both breakthroughs and casualties.
• Owning the whole stack, hardware and software and services together, was a strategy rather than a preference.
• Focus is saying no to a hundred good ideas to protect the few great ones.