It’s Monday, so back to books, and I have a huge reccomendation for you:
DON’T BUY THE STEVE JOBS BIOGRAPHY THAT COMES OUT TODAY.
Don’t buy in physical format. Do not buy it for your Kindle or Nook, and ESPECIALLY do not buy it for your iPad.
Why?
Because you already know all the good bits already. So many of them have been leaked, and a few more are likely to trickle out, but just don’t.
Maybe it’s because I already saw this slobbering lovefest on 60 Minutes last night. Maybe you did, too. If you did, you don’t need to buy this book. And if you want to buy the book, go watch this, and then you don’t need to.
Maybe it’s the numerous conversations I’ve had on Facebook, specifically the one I had with my brother in law who was gloating over Jobs’ prediction that Obama would be a one-term president, when I reminded him that he had previously referred to Apple and iOS as “fascism” compared to Android’s open source being “libertarian.” (you can guess his politics)
Maybe it’s the copy I thumbed through this morning that I picked up and was utterly, utterly bored.
But probably, most of all, is I’m sick of the cult of Steve Jobs. Yes, I love my MacBook, and yes I love my iPod and my iPhone– but those are all just things. It doesn’t mean that I need to worship the ground Steve Jobs walks on. He was Steve Jobs, not Jesus, and if anything, this book reveals how human he truly was.
He was a dick. He treated some of his employees like shit. He complained to Obama about “how easy it is to open a factory in China” compared to the US– and he’s right. A factory where he can house people on site, and where they have to put up nets around the building to keep people from committing suicide because of how terrible the conditions are– building ipads. And they don’t have any of those nasty, evil regulations you have to follow in the US. That way we can have air that looks like this:
Jobs did great things. But he did them at a cost. He was not a saint. He was not even someone to emulate. He amassed huge amounts of wealth, and unlike some of his peers he barely gave any of it to charity. He, almost more than anyone else, typified the hype around consumer culture and made planned obsolescence a normal part of the business plan.
But he did give us the iPhone, so that makes it ok?
It’s time to let Steve Jobs die. It’s sad when any human life is lost, especially to a horrible, painful death like pancreatic cancer. But let’s keep things in perspective.
Don’t buy the Steve Jobs biography.
And now, I invite all of you angry Mac-compatible robots to tell me how wrong I am in the comments section.