Booting Up: New book of Jobs is Apple’s attempt to deify co-founder

Apple's bizarre attempt to burnish the memory of its deeply flawed co-founder Steve Jobs is an insult to his fans and consumers alike.

Just because Apple's slickly designed devices feature a carefully applied patina does not mean that the late CEO's legacy must also be buffed of all stains and blemishes. Memo to Tim Cook, Sir Jonathan Ive and all the Apple brass who have taken up the cause: We're too smart for that.

A new biography, unauthorized by Jobs himself but with heavy input from Apple insiders, goes on sale today. "Becoming Steve Jobs," by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is going over like the official Apple hagiographic response to Walter Isaacson's even-handed, but often critical, blemishes-and-all Jobs bio. Jobs' complexities were reported by Isaacson and others — and confirmed by Jobs himself — including his past refusal to pay child support, his draconian and manipulative management style, his shirking of cancer treatments in favor of pseudo-science that likely shortened his life, and his zealotry for hallucinogenic drugs.

We live in the era that unmasks our idols as flawed humans: Tiger Woods, David Petraeus, Mel Gibson, and many more. We can compartmentalize the genius and the jerk, the good and the bad. And Steve Jobs embodied all those elements at once. Why is that concept so unsavory for Apple? Is it off-brand? Is Apple's confidence in its future so fragile as to require turning the late co-founder into some sort of deity? Apple fanatics do seem semi-
religious at times, I'll grant them that. But have the upper echelons of the company grown so weak and soft as to believe their own hype?

The notion of Jobs as saintly has been shattered time and again, most notably in Isaacson's book for which Jobs himself submitted to dozens of interviews.

But if Jobs himself wanted to be portrayed as real and raw, his colleagues didn't care for Isaacson's account. So they more or less commissioned their own.

"I thought the Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice," Cook says in the new, Apple-endorsed biography. "It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that (Steve's) a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn't capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short."

Ive joined the chorus recently by saying in a recent interview that his "regard couldn't be any lower," for the Isaacson take, while admitting he hadn't fully read it. Also chiming in was Apple software chief Eddy Cue, tweeting last week, "Best portrayal is about to be released — Becoming Steve Jobs (book). Well done and first to get it right."

Jobs had a well-documented dark side. But we couldn't deny that any more than his rescue of Apple from the brink of doom, his visionary achievements in consumer electronics and the passion he had for so many things … including that his own portrayal be accurate and unvarnished.

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