Steve Reads

There’s a genre of tech writing that might legitimately be known as “fanboy fetish porn.” Steven Levy — in books like Crypto and Hackers — always skirts around the edge of the genre. In Insanely Great, he wades into the genre up to his hips.

This is the story of the Mac’s creation, and the story of Steve Jobs’s sticking his nose into everyone’s business. Levy seems a little unsure of Jobs: is he a jerk and an opportunist, who only attaches himself to a project when it might bring Jobs himself more power and glory? Does he force his limited design and technical powers on those beneath him? Is he trying to compensate for his non-Wozniak engineering skills?

Levy may believe all these things, but at the same time he can’t deny that Jobs is a major force for good within Apple. Like the mythical Shaker furniture builders, Jobs won’t let any piece of the Mac go out unless it’s perfect and beautiful. The Shakers wouldn’t build a dresser with a plywood face against a wall, even if no one else would ever see that side; God would see it. Likewise, says Levy, every square inch of the Mac was an aesthetic pleasure.

I may have been too young at the time to have really appreciated the Mac. I certainly appreciate the spur it provided to Windows. Only when Mac OS X came around did I see what all the fuss was about. OS X is the first bit of Mac software that I’ve enjoyed. OS 9 and before felt cartoonish to me. Bomb icons — indicating that some rogue application had taken down the entire computer, which you had no choice at that moment but to reboot — appeared with alarming frequency.

At an architectural level, cooperative multitasking may have been to blame for a lot of the Mac’s instabilities. You will never read anything at that level in Levy’s book. Levy is an English major imported into the world of computers, and I think he’s more interested in the people than he is in the technology. There’s a lot for journalists to sink their teeth into in the world of computers: the 16-hour days, the sleeping under desks, the seat-of-the-pants demos finished mere moments before the curtain comes up. Levy enjoys himself in this realm. He’s less able or willing to explain the technical details of why, exactly, the Mac was repeatedly delayed. The fact of the delay, and the excitement of cigar-chomping executives breathing down frantic hackers’ necks, is more his speed.

Insanely Great has some funny moments, again from the excited-visionary perspective rather than from the awesome-technology one. There’s Steve Jobs, explaining to one of his hardware developers that shaving two seconds off the Mac’s startup time, if millions of people reboot multiple times per day, will save 50 human lives every goddamned day. There are moments, like these, when I understood part of the Mac cult’s allure.

The rest of the book, though, was not convincing. The bomb icons were far too vivid in my memory. Plus I was a DOS 1-2-3 devotee as a child.

What I find funny is that I’ve only just joined the Cult of Apple, in the form of its iPhone. Unlike the Mac, the whole world realizes that the iPhone does its job better than any of its competitors. People are flocking to Apple in droves, giving the phone a market share and platform lead that other device manufacturers only dream about. The iPhone really is Insanely Great. Steve Jobs must be pleased.