“He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson.
He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.” We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make.
But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ” “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs’s sensibility was more editorial than inventive.
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