iCon: Steve Jobs review

'The standard warranty in the electronics business was 90 days; Steve insisted that they needed to sell the Apple II with a one-year warranty, understanding instinctively that you built a loyal body of customers by treating them well.

Scotty (Apple president, Mike Scott) was adamant. Steve started to cry.'

Reading passages like that, it's easy to understand why Apple boss Steve Jobs wasn't overly keen on seeing this book published. After discussing the book with Wiley, Jobs decided he didn't like it; after Wiley refused to kill it, Apple withdrew all Wiley's books from its retail stores.

Anyone who knows Jobs' reputation, or reads iCon: Steve Jobs, won't be at all surprised by this display of petulance.

iCon isn't a hatchet job, but it doesn't spare its subject's blushes when it comes to the manifestation of some of his more idiosyncratic character traits. Young and Simon do a great job of telling the story of Jobs' rise from college drop-out to billionaire without making their subject out to be either a hero or a villain.

It's an engaging and enjoyable read and, for the most part, is well-paced. For anyone who hasn't already read a Jobs biography, there's enough in here to make it well worth the purchase price - although you may want to wait for the paperback.

There are a couple of problems with iCon, though. The first is that you may already have seen a lot of the material. Much of it has been taken from Alan Deutschman's The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, and also from features in Wired. It's clear the research has been carried out by reading material already published rather than talking directly to those involved. And there's far too much third-hand reporting - for example: 'A reporter who was there, Julia Pitta, of Forbes, described the moment to Alan Deutschman'. Why not find someone who was there and get a quote?

The second problem lies in the way the book is structured. From the time it picks up Jobs' story, while he's at high school, until he leaves Apple, the story progresses chronologically and is easy to follow. After that, it necessarily breaks into strands in order to follow the developments at Apple, NeXT, Pixar and Disney. In doing so, it frequently jumps around backwards and forwards in time, making it confusing to follow -something that's not helped by inaccuracies in the timing of key events. We're told that 'Pixar had developed three hugely successful movies in a row - one a year for three years', despite the fact that the authors had just detailed the releases of Toy Story, A Bugs Life, and Toy Story 2 as being in 1995, 1998 and 1999.

Young and Simon also spend too much time detailing events at Disney during the production of Toy Story. Michael Eisner's search for a new Disney president following the death of Frank Wells may have been important for Disney, but it doesn't merit the kind of attention it's given in Jobs' biography.

Flaws aside, iCon is an enjoyable tale and, while it isn't the kind of book that will have you wishing for longer delays on your commute to work, there's enough here to keep anyone who's intrigued by Jobs' unique mix of hippie ideals, megalomania and single-mindedness turning pages from start to finish.