Review of STEVE JOBS

How closed systems defined Steve Jobs’ vision and created Apple

I am an Apple person. I’ve owned an iPhone for a decade, have AirPods and an Apple watch. I had many versions of the iPod, two MacBooks, an iPad Mini, and have been eyeing an iPad Pro. I love Apple products. They’re sleek, synced, and are so easy to use that a toddler can figure it out with no instructions. Exactly what I want.

I’ve had a taste for reading both memoirs and modern tech history in Silicon Valley. Naturally when I discovered Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson, I jumped in. And this book is a beast: nearly 700 pages and 25 hours of audio (I listened to this book). Over those 25 hours, I learned a ton about Apple, tech, and of course, Steve Jobs.

Now, there is nothing in this book that make Jobs sound like a person that I would want to work for or spend any significant amount of time with - he admits he’s an asshole. But the man knew what people wanted. And he knew before they even knew what they wanted. Which is part of what made Apple so successful, especially the second time around during its comeback in the 1990s.

What differentiated Apple from other companies, notably Microsoft then and Google now, was Jobs’ need for controlling the user experience from end to end. This was a radical departure from the early days of computers that were built by hackers like Steve Wozniak, where everything was customized, “jacked in”, and openly compatible with other hardware and software.

Jobs would have none of that.

What differentiates Apple is closed systems. This is literally why you can’t open your iPhone or MacBooks – you get what you get. The tight control of product that is characteristic of Apple made the brand accessible to the masses – anyone could use the products because they were intuitively designed in form and function. It’s definitely the reason I like it. I want a smooth user experience, not one I have to build.

This difference continues to this day, most notably in smartphones. Android’s operating system, the main competitor of the iPhone, can be used by a variety of hardware providers, but iPhone can only be found as a whole package from Apple. When Apple first introduced iPod that only worked with iTunes and MacBook, people thought Jobs was crazy – but it worked. And it continues to work.

There is so much to discover in Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, but this differentiating philosophy stood out across the pages. It’s the single thing that has differentiated Apple from the start – it was the foundation from which the first Macintosh was made. Learning this nugget of knowledge felt like the key to understanding Apple’s success and my own loyalty to the brand. It was a fantastic book to dive into.

Published: October 2011

Format: Audio

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If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:

• We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin (2018)

• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance (2015)

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