Unlike Mr. Sorkin, I did know the real Steve Jobs, for about 14 years — the most productive and successful 14 years of his career running Apple, Inc. I spent scores of hours in private conversations with him over those years, and interviewed him numerous times onstage at a tech conference I co-produced. And the Steve Jobs portrayed in Sorkin’s film isn’t the man I knew.
Sorkin chose to cherry-pick and exaggerate some of the worst aspects of Jobs’s character, and to focus on a period of his career when he was young and immature. His film chooses to give enormous emphasis to perhaps the most shameful episode in Jobs’s personal life, the period when he denied paternity of an out-of-wedlock daughter.
Unfortunately, this is yet another Steve Jobs movie that I'll be skipping. I had high hopes but alas, the book was good enough for me.