I Didn’t Work for Steve

I saw “Steve Jobs” yesterday and loved it. That’s because I didn’t work for Steve, or even meet him.

Although I never came any closer to Jobs than buying Apple products, I’ve still read and heard all the Steve legends and seen all the other movies. I’m up to my ears in information about Steve Jobs. So I didn’t expect this movie to tell me anything new, or to reveal “the truth about the man.” Nothing done four years after anyone’s death, when so many friends, family, and colleagues are still alive, will be the truth.

What’s happening with all these early books and movies about Apple and Steve is the same thing that happens after a war. Everybody writes memoirs from his or her personal perspectives, and nobody has the entire picture. It takes time to separate us enough from the players and the events to make a dispassionate chronicle.

Fifty years from now, some smart historian will come along and piece together the Jobs era from email threads and pieces of paper that have been donated to libraries or stored on the internet by the chief actors. That historian will produce the “definitive” biography when no one with first person memories will be alive to question it.

In other words, we all create our own reality. Steve Jobs may have created a rather large reality distortion field, but he wasn’t alone. This version of Steve was created by Woz, Joanna Hoffman, and Chrisann Brennan. A previous version was created by other sources. And the Walter Adamson book on which this movie is based was created by the dying Jobs and his “authorized” biographer. The other movies and books were created by others out of their own reality distortion fields. I’ve pretty much enjoyed them all.

None is real. But who cares? Makes no difference to me which Steve Jobs brought the Macintosh and the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad to market.