The new Steve Jobs documentary is an unforgiving look at tech's most complicated man
Bryan Bishop / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands mid-wave in the 2015 contest over Steve Jobs's posthumous image. Days earlier, Tim Cook's offer of his liver surfaced from Becoming Steve Jobs, the inner-circle corrective to Walter Isaacson's official biography — so the year already had a sympathetic counter-narrative in circulation before this documentary arrived with an unforgiving one.
The tension is structural: the same record that supplies the hagiography also supplies the indictment — the documented mistreatment of Alvy Ray Smith, the internal emails blocking Kindle in-app purchases after an Amazon ad, the court-revealed 'Fecebook' missive. Later coverage shows how high the stakes got: the feature film shot without Apple's backing under pressure from Laurene Powell Jobs.
First-order effects
- Audiences now hold two opposed portraits simultaneously — the inner-circle-sanctioned warmth of Becoming Steve Jobs against this documentary's harsher accounting — and reviewers must adjudicate between them rather than simply summarize.
Second-order effects
- Apple and the Jobs estate's pattern of withholding cooperation from projects they don't control (later confirmed around the feature film) pushes critical documentarians toward leaked emails, court records, and former employees like Fadell and Forstall as source material.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Silicon Valley founder legacies become permanently contested terrain — every new account forces a re-litigation of whether unpleasant visionaries are worth tolerating for their products, the exact question the NYT's review of the subsequent film put on the table.
The trend: Jobs's legacy is being rewritten in public by rival biographies, films, and documentaries, with Apple's inner circle defending one version while critics assemble another from emails and testimony.