I am disappointed with Gruber's "shades of grey" conclusion. He is of course right that there are good parts as well as bad parts. Maybe I am too "Jobsian", but that equates total crap to me. The abysmal failures of the book leave room for someone else to write the definitive biography. Isaacson had his chance but he blew it. He sold a lot of copies, but the people who misunderstood Jobs won't be the ones spending their time telling the next generation about him. A hundred years from now, the book that people quote regarding Jobs will certainly be written by someone who properly understood the man. Someone who writes that "greatest book ever". This superlative attitude might seem overblown in everyday life, but it's what society values. Second place is in the end the first loser (or at least the first forgotten).
And hat author could be one of us. It can only be someone with the perspective to set it straight. It certainly won't be a writer thinking more about himself than his subject. In history, perspective matters more than profession.
I don't think there are such things as 'the definitive biography/history/story'. All such endeavours are filtered tellings of actual fact through prisms of bias, limited knowledge and the limitations of condensation.
There is a limited amount of attention that we pay to events of the past. Eventually one of them wins, and the others are mentioned only when the first one is notably wrong. There will be other biographies written, and at least one of them will be better than this one.
And hat author could be one of us. It can only be someone with the perspective to set it straight. It certainly won't be a writer thinking more about himself than his subject. In history, perspective matters more than profession.