Of all the Jobs anecdotes doing the rounds from Isaacson’s biography, this one stuck in my mind:
“At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:
Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked.
Going beyond the anecdotes, the New Yorker article discusses the influence of tweakers over that of more original inventors, citing examples in England to explain why industrialization first took off there rather than elsewhere. (I thought the enclosure Acts were more of a prime cause.)
What is clear, however, is that Jobs was one nitpicking son of a gun. If he or I believed in an afterlife, then he would be sulking or shouting on his iCloud, demanding they change the colour and make it incompatible with all the other clouds.
Say what?!