Since acquiring my Apple IIe in 1985, I’ve been a huge fan of the company created by the two Steves. It was a huge investment three decades back, especially for a young journalist thrust into self employment after the folding of the magazine I’d been editing. But transformative. Swapping carbon paper for Xywrite and my calculator for Lotus123, led to productivity improvements beyond my wildest dreams. Since then, apart from very temporary defections to Sony and Nokia, I’ve remained an Apple loyalist, investing into the developing ecosystem as soon as the new product became affordable. That love of the brand has grown to the point of near evangelism – and a rather minority view that Apple shares offer the best value of any stock anywhere. Having read almost as much about Steve Jobs as I have on Warren Buffett, the acclaimed movie on his life was always going to be top of a list of things to do on my next long haul flight. It kept me enthralled for two hours. But, unfortunately, much of it turns out to be fiction rather than fact. – Alec Hogg
After the disappointment of the awful Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher I’ve been savouring the opportunity to watch the apparently serious upgraded latest effort released just before Christmas.
As entertainment, it certainly lived up to expectations. Starring a more believable Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Seth Rogen as co-founder Steve Wozniak, the movie also includes other heavyweight actors in Newsroom’s Jeff Daniels and Oscar winner Kate Winslet.
Ahead of my viewing, I was also impressed that Walter Isaacson, author of the definitive Jobs biography, had been pulled in as the movie’s consultant. Not so much that Danny Boyle was the director given how he had dropped Jobs (thankfully as it turned out) in his hour of need.
As it happened it turned out for the best that Boyle’s didn’t fulfil a commitment to write a speech Jobs regarded as one of the most important of his life. His no show resulted in the brilliant 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech being created by Jobs himself with inputs from wife Laurene.
Mrs Jobs’s absence from this movie is the first of my irritants. It’s quite clear to anyone who read Isaacson’s epic and then reflects, that Jobs’s life is divided very clearly into pre- and post-Laurene. Yet in this movie, there’s not even a mention of her. Instead, it focuses on one of the last flattering aspects of Jobs’s personal life during his pre-Laurene existence.
All of that aside, the movie is most definitely a good way to invest two hours. But only as entertainment. There are too many factual errors for anyone to use it as anything more than that. Which is a pity, because Jobs, especially post-Laurene, lived a life from which it is easy to be inspired.
Having interviewed Steve Wozniak for CNBC two years back, I dropped him a line asking what he thought of the Boyle movie. A rapid and lengthy response shows Woz is rather passionate about these things. It also says much about the modest engineering genius whose contribution to the Apple story is only now receiving the belated recognition it deserves.
Woz’s conclusion is that in many ways the movie misses the real point of what has made Apple the most valuable company on earth: “In the timeframe of this movie, Apple capital value never exceeded it’s Apple days’ value in constant dollar terms. Not while Jobs was gone and we came out with the Apple. Not when Jobs returned. Not when Jobs introduced the iMac in this movie. Not when we got a new OS for the Macintosh (which finally brought it up to LISA levels, maybe 20 years later).
“Our capital value didn’t go up until the iPod. And note that Jobs went open on the iPod, creating iTunes for Windows users too. It doubled our valuation and the happy board granted lots of stock and an airplane to Jobs. It was the start of what Jobs could really do for us. But that was much after the point in time that movies get created for, including this movie. Viewers want the Apple Story that is in their head and the business parts are boring.”
So the movie, Woz concludes, doesn’t provide insight into what made Apple great but “about Steve Jobs’ personality and thinking, his plusses and minuses.”
Those public shouting matches that are such a key theme of Boyle’s tale? They never happened. Says Woz: “Prior to important product launches this sort of stuff wasn’t going on behind the scenes. I never encountered Jobs or said those things at those events.”
And the portrayal of Woz as one of the few people in the company able to tackle the other Steve: “I never stood up to Jobs in real life. He was a friend. I strongly supported the Macintosh and even the NeXT machine as they came from Jobs and did reflect the future.”
What about another continuous strand where Woz keeps asking Jobs to acknowledge those who built the Apple II which was the company’s backbone from which today’s mighty enterprise was built?
Again, Woz says, this is a figment of Boyle’s imagination: “Those things never happened. I have never called a friend an asshole in my life, even when they are. There was a shareholders meeting (after/during/before?) the Macintosh intro (which was the most important computer event of my life and I loved Steve for) where they didn’t mention the Apple, our bread and butter, one time. I noted that.
“I went back to my office in the Apple ][ division and employees there, brilliant and qualified managers, executives, engineers and more, were storming in disgust and ready to quit Apple. They probably had been treated with such disrespect by Jobs but I, in my naivety, didn’t see it as Jobs so much as the CEO, John Sculley. After all, the CEO runs the company.
“Since all the Apple execs and more didn’t have the voice and power that I had, I phoned John Sculley and strongly indicated my disgust at this oversight. John said that the Apple actually had been mentioned 2 times but I sure didn’t hear that. I told him how the Apple people had been so mistreated and I hung up on John. So the issue did happen.” But, as Woz explains, with Sculley not Jobs.
There are other factual errors. Woz notes: “As to the portrayal of the ‘garage’, it’s part of an ongoing myth. We never discussed any product or markets or product features or social benefits of computers in a garage. We never did any designing or prototyping, hardware or software, in the garage. No R&D at all. We did no manufacturing in a garage.
“Steve Jobs used a phone in his bedroom to order parts and get sales and publicity. He may have extended a phone line to the garage but I wouldn’t know as I was barely there. Almost never could there have been more than 2 people in this garage. There were no desks or phones or what you need to create computers. Maybe once a week we’d drive down to pick up completed Apple I boards, bring them to the garage to make sure that they worked, and then we’d drive them to the store to get paid. When you have no money you have to work at home, as little as that work may be. So the garage represents our humble beginnings.
“As another example of the humble start you have when coming from nowhere with no money, 7 of the first 10 people who were involved in the creation of the Apple ][ all went to the same high school. All but Dan Kottke came from my own connections. Out of this garage we sold Apple I computers for half a year, but from the start we knew it was a short-term, intermediate, product. We had demonstrated (for others) the Apple ][ before we ever shipped an Apple I.”
And on the critical aspect of the movie, the daughter Lisa that Steve Jobs fathered by initially refused to acknowledge was his, Woz reckons: “There are dozens of equally shocking things about Jobs, most of which have never been in print. He could do things that no human you liked could do. Things that you would never want your children to do in their lives. Shocking things that break friendships in ways that they never come back, at least not the same as normal friendship.
“This came out in the movie. So did Jobs’ vision of computers that didn’t need computer experts to use. He, after all, was no computer expert. A lot of his failures came about because of this..
“I don’t recall how this movie portrayed the Macintosh failure. Our stock lost ⅓ of its value in a week when the Macintosh sales dropped to 500 per month. Jobs had turned down our Apple project because the estimates were that it would only sell 2000 per month, as a high end Apple.
“The Macintosh failure had nothing to do with its price range. There wasn’t any useful software for it. John Sculley, like myself, believed that the Macintosh was the future of Apple. But hard hard work, not missing a beat, would have to be done for years to build a Macintosh market.
“Sculley and his team did that work. Sculley and his team made the Macintosh successful enough because they believed in it. The world market grew 10 times and Microsoft got it all because we were going to chase the right direction in products for human beings. It took time. Jobs was not fired. He could have had the resources to create his NeXT machine right in Apple.”
Maybe Boyle should have used Woz as his consultant? Or at least bounced the storyline off him before committing it all to celluloid. Had he done so, he may well have had a hit on his hands, rather than a box office disappointment. Truth always sells better than fiction. Even if it isn’t quite as dramatic. But that’s not what Hollywood likes, is it?
