I hate screenwriters trying to rewrite history

should I buy an apple?, ive never owned one. I want an imac...

Totally agreed...

(1) I find it ridiculous, hilarious, and asinine that some idiot replied to this very revealing thread on this board of all places to ask if they should buy a Mac. Seriously, go to an Apple Store... wtf.

(2) Yes! You're right. Sorkin must have taken sheer creative liberty with this plot point and I believe it was only because he's rim-jobbing Jobs, giving him just enough bad behavior to dislike him but flattering him as a prophetic genius so much it actually made me cringe after a while.

Jobs was a Grade A sociopath. He was a smart guy, in the right place, at the right time. He had innate characteristics that made him ideally predisposed to manipulating other people for his own means. I've worked in startups for 20 years. I've worked with people like Jobs. They aren't diabolical geniuses and what the film gets right (especially with the NeXT computer) is that he failed repeatedly.

Did he learn from his mistakes? Sure, to some extent, yet he went ahead and released a G4 Cube years later as well... He was obsessed with his ideas of what the world should be like but they were ideas raped and pillaged from brighter minds. He was just great at doing it. Personally, I think it's disgusting to idolize the man as he embodies characteristics that are downright repugnant. Civilization would have been just fine without Apple or Steve Jobs. In fact, Apple became precisely what its 1984 ad was supposed to stand against, so Jobs played humanity against itself, like all great sociopaths do.

I like this film, as a film buff. It's superbly done, as a film itself. I know 90+% of what's in this film is not what happened, and the Steve in this film is still based on myth of persona not the human being. I'm okay with most parts, but the whole NeXT as a "revenge machine" was too crazy a stretch. Simply way overboard. Also the part where projections of iMac sales sold to Steve as "you won", is so far from truth. As if all that matters was Steve and Woz's bet. Open system won, because PC won.

It took a lot of convincing to get Steve Jobs back at Apple. He accessed what Apple could still do for quite a long time before figuring out what he could do if he returned to Apple. When he figured it out, his first approach was declare the PC war over, Microsoft won, stop fighting it and look into the future. If you go back and look at his presentation after he took over Apple, his vague vision of our digital lifestyle all came true, it's quite eerie.

This movie has writer's conceit all over it. I actually like it, as long as it makes sense and adds layers to the story. After all, this is a fiction based on real life accounts taken from Isaacson's book.

I really liked the first act. Sorkin links Jobs' unresolved issues about being rejected by his adopted parents to his 1. emotional dependency on James Sculley and 2. reluctance to accept his daughter. So, When Sculley is responsible for having him ousted from Apple, he reacts like a betrayed son and fights with him during the second act. It was good until then.
Then Sculley asks "You'll end me. won't you?", I was like "Whaaat?" Jobs tells him off cruelly and walks out on him. It doesn't end there, he shares his secret plan with Joanna, who calls NeXT his "revenge machine", LOL. I agree. That part was too far fetched even for a fiction.

In reality, Sculley was not even there during the NeXT launch. The spoof article by Kawasaki came out in 1994 after Sculley had left Apple. I'm Sure, there were hard feelings and regrets between Sculley and Jobs, but Sorkin took it to "greek tragedy" level.

'when he's launching the NeXT Computer in 1988 where he reveals his grand master plan about how Apple is going to need an OS and they are going to have to come to him of course,'

Never understood that bit. The Next flopped and they never had an OS in the first place according to the movie. Also its well known that Apple's OS is not their own, they just got an open source product and developed it.

It's that man again!!

I think, since this film isn't really a biopic (it doesn't tell the life story of Steve Jobs as such, but tries to show his personality traits), this was a short cut to showing Steve's long held grudges and his abulity / willingness to manipulate others and take revenge, to a ridiculously risky degree.

I always wondered what Apple would have been like if they went with BeOS.

bbagnall ... first name isnt brian is it?

Aaron Sorkin's writing is really getting tired. All of his films feel like a thesis project where he arranges all the 'facts' to fit his pre-conceived notion of the subject matter. It's closed off writing--the audience is never allowed to bring their own thoughts and experience into the interpretation. This film is no exception.