>Isaacson clearly believes that design is merely how a product looks and feels, and that “engineering” is how it actually works.
The author doesn't seem to understand that Isaacson isn't writing for a HN audience. To the vast majority of people "design" does mean only aesthetics, so the author is to some extent justified in following the same route.
Same thing with de-emphasis of software. It is pretty much impossible to explain why a certain piece of software is good using words to a non-programmer audience - who may not even have seen an Apple device. I'd have glossed over software too especially since everyone associates Apple with brushed aluminium hardware anyway.
Just because some aspect isn't discussed in the book doesn't mean the author is ignorant of it.
These types books are meant for mass market entertainment, not a technically literate HN crowd. Of course if you measure the book against the wrong bloody benchmark then it fails miserably. And yet somehow after pages of doing exactly that the author manages to highlight his own mistake in the final 2 sentences:
>Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
" To the vast majority of people "design" does mean only aesthetics, so the author is to some extent justified in following the same route."
If he's writing about Jobs, then it's pretty much inexcusable to fail to put it the way Jobs would, rather than how "the vast majority of people" would.
The author doesn't seem to understand that Isaacson isn't writing for a HN audience. To the vast majority of people "design" does mean only aesthetics, so the author is to some extent justified in following the same route.
Same thing with de-emphasis of software. It is pretty much impossible to explain why a certain piece of software is good using words to a non-programmer audience - who may not even have seen an Apple device. I'd have glossed over software too especially since everyone associates Apple with brushed aluminium hardware anyway.
Just because some aspect isn't discussed in the book doesn't mean the author is ignorant of it.
These types books are meant for mass market entertainment, not a technically literate HN crowd. Of course if you measure the book against the wrong bloody benchmark then it fails miserably. And yet somehow after pages of doing exactly that the author manages to highlight his own mistake in the final 2 sentences:
>Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.