"Jobs" vs. "Steve Jobs": Hollywood Takes Another Stab At Telling the Steve Jobs Story

theodp writes: Didn't like Jobs, the 2013 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher? Maybe you'll prefer Steve Jobs, the 2015 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender. "Steve Jobs is a tech visionary, total dick," writes Esquire's Matt Patches in his mini-review of the just-released Steve Jobs trailer. So, is inspiring kids to become the "Next Steve Jobs" a good or bad thing?

Comments

Inspire kids to be the next Woz, not Jobs

[Mascot]

I hope I won't be disillusioned by someone who has done research into Woz, but what I have heard of Woz has pretty much been all good. Seemingly kind hearted, personal integrity, not all about the money. While Jobs is the guy who lied to his supposed friend about how much he got paid for a project so he could embezzle money from said friend. I know which person I'd rather my children emulate.

Re:Inspire kids to be the next Woz, not Jobs

[tnk1]

Steve Jobs was no saint, but he was an artist in his particular specialty. Woz, God bless him, is a great engineer and a super nice guy, but he'd still be designing hobby projects for fun and maybe have a job as a high level engineer at like HP or IBM or Intel or something today without Jobs. And that's nothing against Woz, but I just think that Woz doesn't care for that kind of success. He's probably happy he can live in some comfort, but he'd rather be an engineer than a corporate leader if he had to choose.

Woz got a little screwed by Jobs perhaps, but are you ever truly screwed if you didn't care to begin with?

Why does Jobs always steal the limelight?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Steve Wozniak as an engineer, and as a person in general, is much more of an inspiration to me.

Re:Why does Jobs always steal the limelight?

[mccalli]

Thing is - there were a lot of talented hardware engineers at the time. Woz owed an awfully large amount to Chuck Peddle, for instance, and the role of MOS and Commodore is massively underplayed these days in a "history is written by the victors"-style approach. Most of the early pure engineering-led eight bit companies died a death, but Apple survived. Why is that? It wasn't due to Woz.

I really don't want to underplay Woz and I agree with the comments, but you can see from his ventures since that the involvement of Woz does not necessarily make for a sustainable company, and Woz alone could not have created Apple.

Re:"Musk" "Elon Musk" "Minky Musky Sly Stoaty Stoa

[tepples]

I'll wait for the furry retelling.

Re:We're All Dicks

[ranton]

We're all dicks. It will inspire some to try to do it without dickness; others are going to be dicks regardless. Seriously, does anyone make it to the top without at least some dickness?

People call Steve Jobs a dick not because he was just a pushy businessman (like most other successful people) but because he really was a dick. He abandoned his daughter for years, which by itself is enough to show he was deep down not a good person. He chose financial success over his own child; other than murder or torture I cannot think of a worst act. It could be argued he became a better person later in life, since it appears he tried to rectify the worst thing he ever did. But financially supporting her after he had plenty of money is hardly a grand gesture.

The world is probably a better place because Steve Jobs existed, but that only goes to show even the most deplorable people can have a very positive impact on the world.

Re:We're All Dicks

[NotDrWho]

I'm pretty sure that letting your own daughter grow up in poverty because you're too selfish to admit your paternity and pay child support goes way beyond "not being squeaky clean."

Re:We're All Dicks

[AmiMoJo]

Sure, but Jobs was a quite unnecessarily big dick to pretty much everyone, including his own daughter and Woz. I mean, is parking in a disabled space and not having plates on your car really required to be successful?

Listen to his famous Stanford speech. "Stay foolish" is terrible advice. He was lucky, until he wasn't and his own advice to trust his gut/fate/karma instead of his doctor killed him. The whole speech is actually a classic example of the reality distortion field. Parts of it are demonstrably false, other bits clearly ridiculous, but his charisma and reputation carries it. So not only is he a dick to people around him, he's also a skilled and habitual bullshitter.

Re:We're All Dicks

[nmb3000]

We're all dicks.

I dislike how this phrase is being used because I think it trivializes the extent to which Jobs was not a good person and introduces an inappropriate levity into the discussion. A much better term would have been acute sociopath.

And another movie about Jobs? Sounds more myopic than biopic. When Hollywood starts making remakes of their failed biographies you know they've scraped through the bottom of the barrel. Most people today only know Jobs as the other Santa who introduced shiny new toys once a year. If you want to read about the interesting stuff, just check out Folklore.org. It's filled with fascinating stories written by the people who created the Macintosh. Steve Jobs even shows up a couple of times.

Trailer left me unimpressed

[bfwebster]

I didn't know Jobs well, but I did have a number of direct conversations with him, sat in on meetings at NeXT with him, spent five years developing software for NeXTstep, and had many talks with people who worked closely him (again, mostly at NeXT); our last conversation was him calling me up to yell at me for an op-ed piece of mine in BYTE (Nov 94) called "Whither Nextstep?"

With that tee-up, I'll say that Fassbender's portrayal of Jobs in this trailer pretty much falls flat. Fassbender looks too professional and lacks that burning gaze that Jobs used to such great effect, even while using up the people around him. Frankly, Fassbender comes across more like John Scully trying to act like Steve Jobs than like Jobs himself. Also, it took me a bit to realize that Seth Rogan was supposed to be playing Woz; again, the wrong vibes and aura. Frankly, I think that Jack Black with a beard would have been a better choice for Woz. ..bruce..