He transformed the way we live: Jobs with his original Macintosh.
Recently a Windows PC I was working on displayed an error message: “I/O device error (0x8007045D).” It instructed “Run CHKDSK /R.” So I dutifully ran CHKDSK /R, and...
Let me pause there. Steve Jobs would have hated this. The Apple co-founder favored simple, graceful technology designs — not impenetrable ones — and products like the iPod and iPhone reflect his tastes. Apple’s customers seem to share them. That’s why the company’s market capitalization is $722 billion.
Jobs was one of the most successful businessmen of all time, and one of the most beloved. When he died in 2011, there was mourning worldwide. Yet he was the kind of manager who recruited a potential employee with these words: “Everything you’ve done so far is crap.”
That’s the contradiction of Steve Jobs, and it’s at the core of the entertaining, troubling documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Writer and director Alex Gibney traces Jobs’ countercultural youth, his coming of age as a tech innovator and his apotheosis as a globally influential tastemaker. In every phase of his life, Jobs was a visionary. And as colleagues, loved ones and observers attest in Steve Jobs, he was really unpleasant to be around.
Gibney’s other documentaries include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. All three films tell distressing, uniquely American stories of ambition and power. Gibney made Steve Jobs without Apple’s cooperation.
From the Apple II and the Macintosh to the iPad, Jobs introduced devices that transformed the way we live. Yet he was a petty man who curtailed Apple’s philanthropy program and routinely parked his Mercedes in handicapped spaces. In an early sequence, we learn of the work Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak did for videogame company Atari in their pre-Apple days. The good news? They accomplished a remarkable feat of engineering. The bad news? Jobs lied about their compensation and saw to it that Wozniak was paid a fraction of what he was due.
Over the course of a remarkable career, Jobs came to embody California’s Silicon Valley, the technology industry’s hub of innovation. He started his company in a garage. He disdained old-school corporate practices. He didn’t merely want to run a successful business or to sell quality products to satisfied customers. In one sequence he tells Apple employees, “We believe people with passion can change the world forever.”
That signature phrase of his, “change the world,” is a running gag in Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, the lacerating HBO sitcom that spoofs technology businesses. Jobs’ brand of callousness also changed the world, as we know from exposés about companies like Amazon and Uber.
Gibney’s film is best at documenting Jobs’ life through the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he roused Apple from its doldrums and introduced a series of blockbuster products. After that, the film becomes choppy and episodic as it covers a series of corporate abuses that aren’t unique to Jobs and Apple: stock option mischief and troubling work conditions in China.
Some of the most disturbing moments are courtesy of Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’ high school girlfriend, who worked at Apple in the early days. She says that when she told him she was pregnant with his child, he ran from the room. In court documents regarding his paternity, he unsuccessfully argued that he was sterile. Around the time that Apple went public and he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he agreed to pay child support: $500 a month.
“He blew it,” Brennan says.
