I'm critical of John Gruber on many topics, but in this essay he is exactly right. Further, there are many examples, just like the Bill Gates one, where Jobs says something that is true[1] and Isaacson assumes its the "reality distortion field" and then quotes someone else, like gates, who has an agenda, telling a lie as "proof" that Jobs is lying.

Lets talk about this "Reality Distortion Field". People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma. Is anyone here willing to admit to being swindled in this way? I am not. I am not aware of Jobs ever saying something that was actually false (though I'm quite aware of many manifold lies told about Jobs.)

For instance, remember the introduction of the iPhone? How about the introduction of the iPad? Everyone here should be old enough to remember one or both of these keynotes. Surely Jobs "Reality Distortion Field" would be deployed to maximum effect at such keynotes-- and after both of them I remember much derision and claims that Jobs had the RDF on maximum and how those products were going to be complete failures, and how everyone needed a keyboard on their phones and how the iPad was a terrible, terrible name, inspired by female hygiene products, etc. etc.

IF you go back and watch these, can you find a single lie? Can you find any reality that was distorted? Sure, Steve Jobs called the iPhone revolutionary. That's obviously a characterization based on an opinion, but that opinions seems to have held up-- before it, there were only feature phones, really, and now every phone that isn't an iPhone is some sort of iPhone counterfeit (e.g.: has a touch screen) It clearly revolutionized the phone category, and created the app ecosystem. Similar things happened with the iPad.

Because Apple is successful, and because Apple does things its own way, people feel the need to attack Apple. And of course, they attack Jobs.

Most of these attacks have clear motivations-- people who bought another product who want to feel it is superior, or people who work for a competitor, or -- and this is the biggest source, I believe-- hack journalists who want to create a sensational story (I still remember a claim that Apple switched from ATI to NVIDIA chips in laptops the week before they were announced because of a leak from ATI... as if Apple could even do that so quickly for a product that was about to ship.... but people believe it. The story was "Steve got really mad and now the new MacBooks will ship with NVIDIA chips!" I know for a fact this is false because you can't change production that fast... but people believe those kinds of lies. After all, they've been told for year that Steve Jobs is an asshole, and, despite never showing this side of himself in public, they believe it.

[1] True because I know it to be true either because I witnessed it, or I'm more informed on the issue than Isaacson is. I've been an Apple watcher for 20 years, and I have noticed that much of what people believe about Apple is based on oft repeated myth without substantiation in fact. I remember Apple trivia fairly well, and the specifics of things that often happened before people writing about them now were out of grade school. (EG: Just this weekend I read in "Inside Apple" the long refuted claim that Apple "stole" Xerox technology for the Mac. Amazing kind of a theft that was-- Apple paid for a license to use that technology with stock which, if held to present, is worth Billions of dollars. Quite the heist!) Another example: for quite a time there, many windows fans believed that Bill Gates owned Apple, because to them $150M is a big "investment" and they think Microsoft bought Apple in 1997. (they didn't know that Apple had a lot more of that in cash already, and that part of the deal-- the bigger part-- was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)