Readers wanted to know more about the work involved in designing and introducing the iPhone, but they also wanted to learn what it might feel like to be above the petty fray of people’s feelings. Isaacson was dogged in depicting Jobs’s personal failures while also crafting a compelling argument for Jobs as the pre-eminent inventor of his time. He was cruel in order to be kind to the vast galaxy of Apple lovers hungry for the next bit of world-changing technology. When Jobs was brutal, or callous, he was acting in the service of a higher cause. But more than that, Isaacson’s Jobs was a kind of deeply satisfying middle-class fantasy figure, a genius whose abilities placed him above the drab landscape of interpersonal morality. Why did Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, published in 2011, connect so deeply with readers? To be sure, the inventor of the iPod and the iPhone had designed masterpieces of technological wizardry that had improved people’s lives.
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