![]() He did his best to manage Apple’s media coverage, and was not above calling influential tech reporters and convincing them to write what he wanted the world to hear. Jobs relished such attention, but only if it came on his own terms. Ever since its founding-but especially in the last decade, when Apple-worship reached its apogee-Apple has been living under the kind of intense public scrutiny that is usually reserved for presidents. Apple-focused blogs regularly brim with rumors and speculation. Apple-watching is an industry: there exists an apparently insatiable demand for books and articles about the company. That the book contains few earth-shattering revelations is not necessarily Isaacson’s fault. ![]() Small anecdotes abound, but weren’t there big themes to discuss? He himself conducted many interviews with Jobs (who proposed the project to Isaacson), and with his numerous colleagues, enemies, and disciples, but as one nears the end of this large book it’s hard not to wonder what it was that Isaacson and Jobs actually talked about on those walks around Palo Alto. Isaacson draws liberally on previously published biographies, and on dozens of interviews that Jobs gave to the national media since the early 1980s. There are few traces of Jobs the philosopher in Walter Isaacson’s immensely detailed and pedestrian biography of the man. So was Steve Jobs a philosopher who strove to change the world rather than merely interpret it? Or was he a marketing genius who turned an ordinary company into a mythical cult, while he himself was busy settling old scores and serving the demands of his titanic ego? It is hard to think of any other big-name CEO who could win such an accolade, and from an earnest German magazine that used to publish long interviews with Heidegger. Jobs’s status as a philosopher seems to have been self-evident. The first was its title: “ Der Philosoph des 21 Jahrhunderts,” or “The Philosopher of the Twenty-First Century.” The second was the paucity of evidence to back up such an astonishing claim. The piece about Jobs in Der Spiegel shed no light on his personality, but it stood out for two reasons.
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