Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine debuted last Friday. While lacking the marketing and star power of next month’s Aaron Sorkin dramatization featuring Michael Fassbender, this documentary offers a more authentic look at the life Apple’s co-founder.

That’s not to say that documentaries are inherently accurate and unbiased; King of Kong proved otherwise. But I appreciated this film’s take on Steve Jobs, even if it took me two viewings. The first time around, I saw it merely as a presentation of facts, none of which were new to me: having been a life-long Apple user, read Walter Isaacson’s biography, and seen the Ashton Kutcher film, there’s little about Jobs’ life that would surprise me. But some additional perspectives granted me new insight into the film. Those views came from Dave Ross, whom I previously quoted for my Halt and Catch Fire review; and Steve Weyhrich, whom I quoted in my 2008 story about an Apple IIc unboxing. Each are bonafide retrocomputing experts, without whom I likely would’ve produced a much more critical — and boring — review.

The resulting article, “New Jobs movie: A quieter, more authentic portrait“, was my first for Computerworld in 2015. I applied my usual editing process of printing out my draft, reviewing the hardcopy, then soliciting feedback of the edited version from a few friends (in this case, Steve and Dave) before submitting the final copy.

The more red I see on my drafts, the happier I am with the final copy.

With Juiced.GS‘s launch of Opus ][ just the day before my Computerworld deadline, and the beginning of the academic semester the day after, it was a stressful week — but everything turned out excellently.

It’s a good film, too — perhaps a bit long at two hours, but there’s plenty of good material in there. Here’s my favorite scene: