The real genius of Steve Jobs
Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife
to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-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, Laurene 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?’ ”