Steve Jobs, a 54-year-old Buddhist pescatarian (a fish-eater who abstains from meat and poultry), was born in San Francisco. His parents were unmarried graduate students, and he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a blue-collar couple living in Mountain View, California, near what would later become Silicon Valley. A badly behaved schoolboy and college dropout, Jobs became fascinated by the idea of personal computers in the late 1970s, and founded Apple Computer Inc with Steve Wozniak.

Jobs had the aesthetic and marketing imagination, Wozniak the technical. It worked. By the age of 23, Jobs was worth $1m, by 24 $10m, and by the time he reached 25, $100m. Now, of course, he is worth billions. Leander Kahney's book tells us how he did it, but not really why. Inside Steve's Brain is grossly mistitled. This is a business book, not a psychological study.

Initial success gave way to internal conflict and, in 1985, Jobs was ejected from Apple. The company declined, and, by the mid-1990s, it was circling the drain. In 1996, Jobs returned, becoming chief executive the following year. Over the next decade he saved the company with the iPod, the iPhone, a highly profit-able retail chain, superb product design and Mac OSX, a sane computer-operating system for non-geeks. He also supported the highly successful animation studio Pixar.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. This is almost invariably a death sentence, but, later the same day, the tumour was found to be operable. He recovered, although he is now on prolonged sick leave from Apple, apparently due to the side effects of his post-operative regimen.

The story has the contours of a myth: the boy of humble and ambiguous origins rises to the throne. He is deposed, the nation sickens, he returns and cures it. There is even a miraculous salvation from certain death.

Jobs knows the importance of this myth. Apple is not a company, it is a belief system that happens to be listed on the stock market. New products are shrouded in secrecy, even within the company itself. They are unveiled at “prayer meetings” when Jobs himself appears, the pentecostal fire descending on the heads of the faithful, in jeans, trainers and a black t-shirt. The machines are not sold, they are bestowed. Apple advertising, meanwhile, is stratospherically cool, taking its dominance over its prime rival, Microsoft, for granted. Although Microsoft is not really threatened by this - in the global computer market Apple remains a small niche player - it plainly hurts. Microsoft makes lame attempts to outcool Apple; all fail. Soon after Jobs's return, Apple released a range of computers that looked like wine gums. Bill Gates was baffled. He didn't get it, but that's the point; aesthete Apple exists to baffle philistine Microsoft. Jobs was once asked for his biggest criticism of his rival. “They have no taste,” he replied. Jobs is all about taste.

Kahney briskly dispenses with the personal detail in the introduction and then we move straight on to a fairly conventional business narrative. The author has talked to many of the primary players - though not, apparently, Jobs himself - and the story rattles along nicely. There's the way Jobs simply stares at things for hours before announcing how they must be fixed - the traffic-light colours at the top left of Apple windows were the result of one such staring session. And there's his conviction that his products are fundamentally different from all others, that they are world-changing. “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life,” he asked future Apple CEO John Sculley when trying to recuit him from PepsiCo, “or do you want to change the world?”

The Jobs brain, however, remains unpenetrated. Indeed, the personality that emerges here seems too inconsistent to be quite real. Kahney starts out by saying that he is going to refute those Jobs hatchet jobs protraying him as a shouty tyrant, but then contradicts himself. “Yes, his commitment produces a lot of screaming,” he writes, “and shouting. Jobs is no pussycat when dealing with underlings.” So, as you were - he's shouty.

The book also aspires to be one of those how-to guides read by young men on the make in airports. Each chapter ends with a series of Lessons from Steve. Most of these are harmless, but Be a Despot (“It's okay to be an asshole, as long as you're passionate about it” and “Don't listen to your customers”) might well prove fatal in the wrong hands. In fact, I'm pretty sure that any company that wasn't run by Jobs pursuing these tips would be brought to its knees in a fortnight.

Jobs's Apple is not a repeatable formula because Jobs isn't. He wants his products to be perfect - in a way that he alone can determine. Ideally, they are like his brain: impenetrable boxes to which his customers have no access. He is an extreme elitist. His company is an aristocracy whose task is to brighten the lives of its customer-serfs. In this Jobs is at one with Henry Ford, who said, “If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse.” Steve knows better than you what you will first want and then need. He doesn't do focus groups. He's too focused.

www.bryanappleyard.com

Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney
Atlantic £8.99 pp304

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