Steve Jobs changed the objects in our pockets and the way we think about design, technology, and beauty. Walter Isaacson's biography tells that story compellingly. Alex Gibney's documentary asks what it cost — and who paid.

There is a version of the Steve Jobs story that has become so familiar it functions almost as mythology. The garage, the exile, the return, the products that redefined entire industries. The black turtleneck. The reality distortion field. The man who understood what people wanted before they knew they wanted it. Walter Isaacson's biography, written with Jobs's full cooperation in the final years of his life, tells this version with care and considerable skill — and it is, on its own terms, a genuinely compelling account of one of the most consequential figures in the history of consumer technology.

Isaacson unpacks Jobs's philosophy of innovation as the fusion of art, technology, and business into something none of them could produce alone. Jobs believed, with an almost religious conviction, that the line between the tool and the experience of using it was where everything important happened. This produced objects of unusual coherence — products in which the hardware, the software, the packaging, and the retail environment were all expressions of a single sensibility. The standard for user experience that Apple set under Jobs did not just change Apple's competitors. It changed what people expected from every designed object they touched.

At the centre of Isaacson's portrait is a phrase Jobs returned to repeatedly: the journey is the reward. It captures something real about his relationship to process — his refusal to separate the act of making from its outcome, his insistence that the creative process itself was where meaning lived, not merely in the product at the end of it. It also, read less charitably, describes a man who could justify almost anything in the name of the work. The journey was the reward. For Jobs. The people travelling alongside him had a more complicated experience.

This is where Alex Gibney's documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015) becomes essential — not as a rebuttal to Isaacson but as the question his biography is too close to its subject to fully ask. Gibney is interested in the gap between the devotion Jobs inspired and the behaviour that devotion coexisted with: the colleagues humiliated in meetings, the early Apple employees excluded from stock options that would have made them wealthy, the daughter he denied for years, the cancer diagnosis he delayed treating while experimenting with alternative therapies. Isaacson acknowledges these things. Gibney dwells in them, and asks what it means that we have largely chosen to look past them.

The documentary's most unsettling argument is structural rather than personal. Jobs didn't just behave badly as an individual — he built an organisation in which a particular kind of brutal perfectionism was institutionalised, in which the pressure to meet his standards produced both extraordinary work and serious human cost. The question Gibney poses, without quite answering it, is whether those two things were separable — whether the products could have existed without the pathology, or whether the pathology was, in some functional sense, part of the design.

This matters for how we think about innovation. The Jobs mythology has been enormously influential on how the tech industry understands itself — the difficult genius whose vision justifies his methods, the leader whose standards are so high that ordinary ethical constraints become negotiable. That model has been replicated, with varying degrees of self-awareness, across Silicon Valley and beyond. Isaacson's biography, for all its virtues, tends to reinforce it. Gibney's film refuses to do so. "The journey is the reward" is a beautiful idea. It depends entirely on whose journey you're talking about.