On the trail of Steve Jobs in California

THE BESTSELLING biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is most notable for revealing that the innovator and aesthete genius behind Apple — the world’s most successful company — was in many ways a giant, semi-autistic toddler.

With his boundless egomania, temper tantrums and quirks like refusing to wash, Jobs does not come out as your everyday hero. Yet Steve was my hero. His wacky idea of making computers easy appealed to me as a technology writer. That, along with his maverick unpredictability, made him the Brian Clough of electronics — Clough being my other hero.

The second most remarkable thing about Steve, though, was that for someone who changed the world so fundamentally — it’s because of him that we all have computers — he seemed to have been brought up, worked and died within a small radius of his childhood home near Palo Alto, California. Somehow I always imagined Steve — barefoot Buddhist, design guru, tastemaker — not as a hometown boy, but someone more metropolitan or bohemian, or who would seek out a remote “spiritual” place to live.