David

Having been an engineer in the tech industry since the early 80s, I found the behind the scenes detailed descriptions fair and honest, and immensely interesting. An "Apple Hater" for most my life (mostly because of my philosophical differences on open vs closed systems), the stories told of what the teams of people went through to arrive at the final product. Despite his successes, I still think many people that worked for him had a love-hate relationship considering his demeaning way of treating people that were trying to carry out his wishes.

Issacson does a credible job in reading. He gives expression where needed without going over the top.

My only complaint might be some of the redundancy. There is one place near the end of the book where Steve Jobs describes many times how the Mac or PC will stop being the center of the hub of digital media storage, as the cloud (iCloud) will take over that role. This is probably repeated at least 5 times in various meetings and recalls - small quibble though.

I came away from the book with the thought that Jobs was a man who enjoyed the destination, not the journey. With all his tumultuous tantrums, lies, reality distortion, and contradictions, its truly amazing what the final destination produced.