Sorkin's attempt to rewrite history

Rating: 5/10 (1 November 2015)

The scenes and dialog in Steve Jobs are well-written and reasonably well-acted but stunningly, they contain rapid-fire misinformation--often here and gone before the largely ignorant audience even knows it--that is purely of Aaron Sorkin's invention concerning the early life and times of Steve Jobs the human being. Yes, Jobs renounced his daughter Lisa early on, which is the largest element of the movie's storyline, but she was living with her father before she began high school, not estranged from him well into college.
Jobs and Apple did not steal the graphical user interface from Xerox/PARC, they bought it fair and square--before Bill Gates found out about the opportunity--then turned it into a rich, mature product that mere mortals could afford. The Xerox/PARC version required a $100K computer and used an unwieldy mouse. The Apple version ran on a $2500 computer using a $15 mouse, and the graphical interface included folders and drop-down menus which the world has taken for granted for 3 decades but that the Xerox/PARC version lacked.
Time magazine had indeed originally planned to appoint Steve Jobs as its Man of the Year--which is why Jobs gave Time reporters such open access to Apple; the cheap papier-mache sculpture that appeared instead of Jobs on the magazine cover supports--not undermines--Jobs' claim that Time changed its mind.
Steve Wozniak was not around during the time periods covered in the movie. He crashed a private plane and suffered a severe concussion in about 1981 that forced him into immediate retirement, years before this movie's storyline even began.
No way in h*ll did Jobs launch his NeXT computer company and risk his entire fortune with the expectation it would fail or be acquired by Apple.
As a software developer, I lived in the SF Bay Area through and beyond the early Apple and NeXT eras. Avie Tevanian was an operating systems guru hired out of graduate school by Jobs to work at NeXT and to bring with him the Mach OS kernel he invented at Carnegie Mellon University. Long before the NeXT Cube was introduced, the computer would have been running the Mach OS. The demos would not have run without an OS, despite Sorkin's claim to the contrary which (among other fabricated events) seems aimed squarely at disparaging Jobs' ethics. Apps simply don't run on hardware without an OS. They don't now and they didn't then. Sorkin attempts to portray Jobs as unethical for demonstrating a computer "without an OS", which I've indicated is patently erroneous. But notice that the computer wasn't yet for sale, because the computer wasn't yet ready, and this was proper and ethical of Jobs. There is nothing illegal or even unethical about demonstrating a product before its release. But that doesn't stop Sorkin from trying to convince the audience otherwise.
In "artistic" fashion, Sorkin has Jobs speaking repeatedly with John Scully over the infamous boardroom decision that ousted Jobs from Apple. In reality, the two men never spoke again. While the memory of that incident would have been painful for Jobs, I sincerely doubt it had any bearing on his psyche in the intense lead-up to product announcements.
Sorkin contrasts the hooting and stomping of Apple fans waiting in the audience at each product announcement to the pettiness and vitriol he imagines spewing from Jobs behind the curtain. But all real-world accounts of Apple product announcements from employees who were there under Jobs' leadership indicate that they were hectic, highly rehearsed and focused events. Do you think Sorkin was obsessing over his divorce in the lead-up to his promotional gigs for this movie? I don't think so.
Little of Jobs' charismatic drive comes through in the movie. Instead it's all about Jobs' personal failures--planned, imagined and otherwise--as choreographed by the screenplay writer.
The studio paid Walter Isaacson millions of dollars for the rights to his authorized biography of Steve Jobs, but that money was wasted, the plot is so diverged from reality. I would challenge Sorkin to indicate what elements of the book he used. My take on the movie is that Sorkin is a technology numbskull who could not grasp the real Steve Jobs story, so he focused on human emotions, which he does understand, and invented a plot in another universe for his own amusement and that of an ignorant public.