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The real genius of Steve Jobs

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to nineteen-thirties, Cotswold’s-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little? difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurence Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’
1991年，史蒂夫 喬布斯結(jié)婚后不久，便和妻子搬到帕洛阿爾托（美國(guó)加利福尼亞州西部城市，靠近舊金山），住進(jìn)一幢建于20世紀(jì)30年代，科茨沃爾德式的老房子里。喬布斯總是為了如何布置新居而發(fā)愁。他先前的房子只有一張床墊，一張桌子和若干把椅子。他需要一切都是完美的，并且需要花時(shí)間去理解什么是完美。這一次，他把他妻子和家人也一起拉了進(jìn)來(lái)，可情況卻和以往有些不同。在艾薩克森為蘋果創(chuàng)始人撰寫的引人入勝的新傳記《喬布斯傳》中，喬布斯的妻子勞倫·鮑威爾，告訴艾薩克森，“我們花了8年的時(shí)間從理論角度討論家具，并且用大量時(shí)間反復(fù)問(wèn)自己一個(gè)問(wèn)題，“為什么需要一套沙發(fā)？”

It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”
然而，最讓人煩惱的原來(lái)是關(guān)于洗衣機(jī)的選擇。喬布斯發(fā)現(xiàn)，歐洲產(chǎn)的洗衣機(jī)和美國(guó)產(chǎn)的同類產(chǎn)品相比，用的洗滌劑和水更少，而且更柔和不傷衣物。但是歐產(chǎn)洗衣機(jī)完成一次洗滌循環(huán)的時(shí)間卻是美國(guó)的兩倍。怎么辦呢？喬布斯解釋，“我們花時(shí)間在家庭成員中討論如何作出權(quán)衡。結(jié)果我們談了很多方案，也談了我們家的價(jià)值觀。我們最關(guān)心的是洗完衣服需要1小時(shí)還是1個(gè)半小時(shí)嗎？是衣服是否柔軟耐穿？還是我們關(guān)心用了1/4（噸）的水呢？大概2個(gè)星期的時(shí)間，我們每天晚餐時(shí)都在談?wù)撨@些問(wèn)題?！?/div>

Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Job’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson.
?艾薩克森的傳記寫得很清楚，喬布斯是個(gè)復(fù)雜和糾結(jié)的人。鮑威爾告訴艾薩克森，“喬布斯生活中的一部分的確是一團(tuán)糟，這是事實(shí)。你不應(yīng)該粉飾?！敝档梅Q許的是，艾薩克森沒(méi)有粉飾。他跟喬布斯生涯中的每個(gè)人對(duì)話，一絲不茍地記錄談話內(nèi)容，然后時(shí)光重返到二三十年之前。我們知道，喬布斯是個(gè)混蛋。喬布斯的一個(gè)朋友告訴艾薩克森，他有著不可思議的能力，可以看穿別人的弱點(diǎn)，知道如何讓人感到渺小，感到畏縮。

Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase... He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”
喬布斯讓他女朋友懷孕了，卻否認(rèn)孩子是他的。他把車停到殘疾人停車區(qū)。他對(duì)下屬大吼大叫。當(dāng)他無(wú)法隨心所欲時(shí)，會(huì)像個(gè)嬰兒一樣哭泣。當(dāng)他車速超過(guò)100英里/小時(shí)，被交警攔下時(shí)，因?yàn)殚_罰單的時(shí)間太長(zhǎng)而對(duì)著交警憤怒地按喇叭，然后又以時(shí)速100英里的速度返程。他坐在餐館里，再三退回他點(diǎn)的食物。他晚上10點(diǎn)到達(dá)紐約的酒店套房，接受報(bào)刊的采訪，聲稱鋼琴必須重新擺放，草莓?dāng)?shù)量不夠，所有的花都不對(duì)：他要馬蹄蘭。（當(dāng)他的公關(guān)助理在半夜帶來(lái)了他要的花，他卻告訴助理說(shuō)，“你的套裝很‘惡心’?！保?0年代后期，創(chuàng)立NeXT后，喬布斯修建了工廠。艾薩克森寫道，“因?yàn)閱滩妓箯?qiáng)制修改他的顏色計(jì)劃，機(jī)器和機(jī)器人被來(lái)回涂上不同的顏色。墻面是博物館白，如同在Macintosh工廠一樣，有價(jià)值2萬(wàn)美元的黑色皮椅子和定做的樓梯……他堅(jiān)持機(jī)器要配置在165英尺高（50米）的組裝線上，電路板做成時(shí)從右向左移動(dòng)他們，以便訪客在參觀走廊上觀看時(shí)，整個(gè)流程有更好的視覺(jué)效果。”

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