First "Steve Jobs" review finds biography worthy of its subject - Page 2

The book must be a lot better than that awful, horrible documentary/tribute called 'iGenius' that Discovery slapped together about Steve Jobs.

I find it interesting that so many people distinguish Scientist from Engineer.

It really should be the Engineer from Scientist.

Engineers are Scientists who make products and implement Scientific theory by bring it to the general masses.

Scientists focus on research of the theoretical and rarely, if at all, produce a product or solution that directly impacts humanity.

Not all Engineers get their Ph.D but very few degree'd Physicists, Chemists, Biologists, etc., do any applied science work if they don't get their Ph.D. They get a B.S. and move on to some other field.

Good question. It will eventually be on Audible.com but perhaps the iPhone can read it to you from the ibooks app. It should.

Personally, I'm not that interested in reading the book or even knowing the private thoughts and conversations he had. I prefer to remember him as I do now since I have been a fanatical Apple user almost from the very beginning starting with the Mac Plus. I did end up with a Franklin as a Christmas present prior to that as my first computer. Too bad it wasn't an Apple II but my parents didn't know the difference and the Franklin was cheaper. My father was always the bargain hunter having grown up during the depression, although he did afford himself a Cadillac, which I had to wash every week for my allowance, but I digress.

I wish we didn't have to discuss his legacy... Miss you Steve...

This book should be bundled with every new iPad.


Just a nitpick, but: 'Simplistic' means 'superficial, oversimple, oversimplified; shallow, jejune, naive.' I don't think that's what you're trying to say. Jobs believed in paring-down everything to its core essentials, which is more or less the opposite of 'superficial' (and also a lot more work than meets the eye). He did believe in 'simplifying' things, if you like.

That is, of course, ridiculous.

You could also say that scientists are the ones who invent new things and engineers are merely tinkerers who execute the ideas that others create. That's not essentially true, either.

Both are necessary and play an important role. Scientists discover new concepts, new principles, and new technologies. Engineers reduce them to practical applications. Neither one would be all that useful to society without the other.

You're also wrong to claim that engineers are scientists. That is not even close to the truth. The education and skill sets are entirely different (other than, of course, a tiny number of people who are skilled in both).

You probably can't name a single technology or product that is solely the work of an engineer OR a scientist.

As a educated scientist that does engineering for my paycheck. I completely agree with this response. Engineers and Scientists fill two different roles, just as the above mentions.

Now, I'm biased of course in saying that Scientists are able to make better engineers than the other way around! But I've seen some educated engineers do some good science. But there are many scientists that follow-up with decent engineering.

But they are completely separate endevors requiring two different skill sets.

IQ78

You can buy it from itunes and still read it elsewhere. You didn't know that? Just look in the itunes data folder and drag it over.

Is there still a myth that if you buy something through apple's itunes, that you're stuck using an apple device? The same applies for songs and movies. Just drag it over. I've been buying music from itunes long before I owned an ipod/iphone. I used to put them on my mp3 players that held 20 songs at a time.

I just tried putting an iPhone app on my Android phone and lo and behold, it worked!

I couldn't run it though.

Like Prince once said, 'never meet your heroes'

I, too, am skeptic in buying this book. I'd prefer to remember him the way I do now, without any 'deep knowledge' on his temper and such.

Still, intrigued and probably will buy and read it in the end anyway. Have read lots of articles, just never bought a book about him.

Books have some advantages and disadvantages vs film. In the following Bloomberg documentary, they have footage of Woz and early footage of Jobs, which is hard to convey with just words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgiEG-NsAB0

There are nuances in the dialog like you hear in the Think Different clip narrated by Jobs that can never come through in a book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEPhLqwKo6g

The advantage that text has is that it makes it easier to describe scenarios that were not filmed and would therefore have to be recreated using actors.

The best of both would be some digital publication that combines text and footage like the interactive magazines you see on the iPad. Hopefully there will be a digital publication of the book but it would also be quite a good gesture if it contained some interactive media.

I actually feel it would be a good tribute to publish it exclusively on the iOS devices, even for a short time. Publishing using paper just seems contrary to the motivations of the subject of the book.


Prince McClain is quite the philosopher but surely it's better to have no heroes than isolate your knowledge of people you feel have earned the title. Take inspiration from others but regard them as you should yourself: fallible, emotional, vulnerable, mortal.

Can't wait- tomorrow at Barnes and Noble 10AM.

That may be ...

Still, it feels wrong, sad to read, hear about his dismissive characterization and angry rants about his rivals and peers so soon after they have heaped praise for his life's work. If the book is indeed his way of showing what he is about to his children, they are learning what we knew from way back - humility is not prominent amongst his qualities.

Amazon whenever I want .

So much misunderstanding here. Yet people spout it all with so much conviction. Fascinating.

It's not true that engineering and science are completely different endeavors.
It's not true that engineering and science require different skill sets.

These statements are completely off the mark because different engineering disciplines are as different from each other as classical science and engineering. Likewise with different branches of science.

Having said that, the line between science and engineering is very, very blurred.

For sure, it's totally wrong to say that scientists develop theoretical principles and engineers apply them to *invent* new things. Engineers develop new theoretical principles all the time, particularly those in academia. Scientists make new things all the time too.

Take the invention of computing, it is a marvelous recombination of information theory and electrical engineering. Where do science and engineering begin and end? Was Claude Shannon a scientist or engineer?

Another example is synthetic chemistry. Synthetic chemists are scientists and make compounds.

Take theoretical physics - THEORETICAL physics. Well, to conduct their research, often they cannot just delve in theory. They may need to build prototypical experimental systems all the time. Sometimes they do this with the help of engineers. Often, they do it themselves.

And what about genetic engineering? Despite its name, this field is generally considered a branch of science, and those studying this field are mostly scientists. But they too make new things (e.g. organisms, proteins, DNA) ALL THE TIME.

These few examples show that science and engineering often cross-pollinate. It's just oh so wrong to say they require different skill sets, because the most important skill sets in both endeavors are curiosity and analytical thinking. With this in mind, I guarantee you that most good scientists would be good engineers, and vice versa. Guaranteed!

It's also wrong that undergrads with science degrees who do not obtain PhDs end up working in working in completely different disciplines. Many scientists with B.Sc. and M.Sc. work in research labs and pharmaceutical companies as technicians, as inspection scientists in industries such as food, in clinical labs testing blood samples, etc.

I could go on, but hopefully some of you get the gist and dial down the self-righteousness when you know not what you speak. It's just silly to diss other people with misinformation.

Now, true engineers know there is only one way to differentiate between scientists and engineers:

A scientist and an engineer are peeing in adjoining urinals. The engineer finishes his business and starts walking out. The scientist says in disgust, "In science, we learn to wash our hands after peeing to avoid contamination." The engineer replies in equal disgust, "In engineering, we learn not to pee on our hands."

Just got an email from Apple saying my preorder was ready, and the book is downloading to my iPad now...

And in what country are you located?

Australia. It is 4:22am on Oct 24 here.

Edit: the email was sent at 4:09am

Yep, and that is the reason why I can't reach the app store at the moment. Everybody wants the new Bible

While Jobs was effusive in his praise of Ive, a rare thing for him to do, the British-born senior vice-president of industrial design at Apple was less so.

"He (Jobs) will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one," Isascson wrote quoting Ive.

"And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from. a¦ So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs."

It's only a mere 20MB - LOL

Not the "Sucker born every minute" part, though.




I agree with Einstein not being a good correlation. Am I off the mark to suggest a comparison to T. A. Edison?

I see Edison as one of the worst comparisons you could make to Jobs. Edison executed ideas with his own hands. He was a bona fide inventor, at least in his younger days. Jobs was a lot more like Einstein in that he had an idea of something that others worked to execute. Einstein and Jobs both saw something complex and tried to make it simple.

I'm not saying either man could even understand how each other saw their distinct worlds, but from a purely fundamental level Einstein and Jobs were thinkers working with hypotheses that engineers proved with with tangible production.

One a businessman simplifying consumer electronics and the other a scientist simplifying the cosmos. Edison and Jobs comparison begins and ends almost squarely with business, though Edison seems a lot more like Gates in his desire to dominate a market without any since of style.

Speaking of taking undue credit, your entire post was lifted from elsewhere - word for word. Please credit the source.

Just received the book on my Kindle.

I see your point, and now that you explain your reasoning so well, I agree with you on that level. I guess I was thinking more in the way that both Jobs and Edison saw other's products and inventions, how rudimentary and unrefined they were, and looked to perfect them. They both saw great ideas and inventions and made it their life's work to perfect them for the masses with practicality and ease of use.


Edit: Check the Mod's post #52, 50 seconds into the clip where one guy suggests Edison also. While I concede your point, I see this too.

After all, it must be true....I saw it on the Internet!

Oh man I really really hate that. I've been plagiarized once and somebody patented one of my ideas once. The people who did that are right on top of my list of people who I do not like at all, because they ruined a small part of my career.

Edit: and please quote your source because you are now doing almost the same thing: taking some else's 'idea' and making it seem like your own.

Screw real books. There are so many advantages to reading an e-book.

I'm not one of those hippy treehugger freaks, but real books are basically a waste of space and paper.

It is much more convenient to read on a device like an iPad. You don't need two hands to read or to turn the pages, you don't have to rely on ambient lighting, you can make the text smaller or larger, an iPad is much thinner than a book, it's more convenient to hold and the overall experience is simply better.

That is a very good documentary and I enjoyed watching it a lot. Thank you for the link!

He was a visionary like Franklin. He did not bring his vision to the variety of areas Franklin did, but he lived almost 30 years less. Franklin accomplished a lot in his last 28 years.

The Einstein comparison seems off, but I would like to see the context. Einstein's peers often thought he was foolish too.

Yours is an interesting twist. I think he may have been more like an early einstein and a later Edison. Later in life, the Edison / Jobs comparison is really remarkable. They both built massive industries out of products people weren't really sure they needed.