The real genius of Steve Jobs

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to nineteen-thirties, Cotswold’s-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little  difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurence Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’
1991年,史蒂夫 乔布斯结婚后不久,便和妻子搬到帕洛阿尔托(美国加利福尼亚州西部城市,靠近旧金山),住进一幢建于20世纪30年代,科茨沃尔德式的老房子里。乔布斯总是为了如何布置新居而发愁。他先前的房子只有一张床垫,一张桌子和若干把椅子。他需要一切都是完美的,并且需要花时间去理解什么是完美。这一次,他把他妻子和家人也一起拉了进来,可情况却和以往有些不同。在艾萨克森为苹果创始人撰写的引人入胜的新传记《乔布斯传》中,乔布斯的妻子劳伦·鲍威尔,告诉艾萨克森,“我们花了8年的时间从理论角度讨论家具,并且用大量时间反复问自己一个问题,“为什么需要一套沙发?”

It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”
然而,最让人烦恼的原来是关于洗衣机的选择。乔布斯发现,欧洲产的洗衣机和美国产的同类产品相比,用的洗涤剂和水更少,而且更柔和不伤衣物。但是欧产洗衣机完成一次洗涤循环的时间却是美国的两倍。怎么办呢?乔布斯解释,“我们花时间在家庭成员中讨论如何作出权衡。结果我们谈了很多方案,也谈了我们家的价值观。我们最关心的是洗完衣服需要1小时还是1个半小时吗?是衣服是否柔软耐穿?还是我们关心用了1/4(吨)的水呢?大概2个星期的时间,我们每天晚餐时都在谈论这些问题。”

Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Job’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson.
 艾萨克森的传记写得很清楚,乔布斯是个复杂和纠结的人。鲍威尔告诉艾萨克森,“乔布斯生活中的一部分的确是一团糟,这是事实。你不应该粉饰。”值得称许的是,艾萨克森没有粉饰。他跟乔布斯生涯中的每个人对话,一丝不苟地记录谈话内容,然后时光重返到二三十年之前。我们知道,乔布斯是个混蛋。乔布斯的一个朋友告诉艾萨克森,他有着不可思议的能力,可以看穿别人的弱点,知道如何让人感到渺小,感到畏缩。

Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase... He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”
乔布斯让他女朋友怀孕了,却否认孩子是他的。他把车停到残疾人停车区。他对下属大吼大叫。当他无法随心所欲时,会像个婴儿一样哭泣。当他车速超过100英里/小时,被交警拦下时,因为开罚单的时间太长而对着交警愤怒地按喇叭,然后又以时速100英里的速度返程。他坐在餐馆里,再三退回他点的食物。他晚上10点到达纽约的酒店套房,接受报刊的采访,声称钢琴必须重新摆放,草莓数量不够,所有的花都不对:他要马蹄兰。(当他的公关助理在半夜带来了他要的花,他却告诉助理说,“你的套装很‘恶心’。”)80年代后期,创立NeXT后,乔布斯修建了工厂。艾萨克森写道,“因为乔布斯强制修改他的颜色计划,机器和机器人被来回涂上不同的颜色。墙面是博物馆白,如同在Macintosh工厂一样,有价值2万美元的黑色皮椅子和定做的楼梯……他坚持机器要配置在165英尺高(50米)的组装线上,电路板做成时从右向左移动他们,以便访客在参观走廊上观看时,整个流程有更好的视觉效果。”

其实,你可以订阅我们——人人都是《纽约客》:

声明:双语文章中,中文翻译仅代表译者个人观点,仅供参考。如有不妥之处,欢迎指正。