On the 5th of October, at 56 years old, Steve Jobs finally succumbed to the cancer he had been fighting for eight years. He was probably the greatest entrepreneur of our generation.

The iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad all owe their genesis, in various degrees, to Steve Jobs. In an earlier stint at Apple (which he co-founded), he revolutionized computing with the first Macintosh.

His successes as CEO have been incredible: in the last few years, Apple, in terms of market capitalization, surpassed not just Microsoft, it’s arch-rival, but also, briefly, Exxon — becoming for a few hours (this August) the most valuable company in the world.

Walter Isaacson’s biography is the first to benefit from Jobs’s cooperation. It’s based on over 40 interviews with Steve Jobs himself, and the biographer, who has in the past tackled visionaries such as Franklin and Einstein, was given unrestricted access to his family and friends.

The book comes packed with revelations: it exposes Jobs’ mercurial, often intolerable personality; his polarized view of the world (people were ‘heroes’ or ‘bozos’; products, ‘perfect’ or ‘shit’); his unparalleled focus. Jobs operated with ‘a reality distortion field’. As readers we are almost unsurprised to find that annual awards were once handed out for standing up to him. Though Isaacson clearly admires Jobs’s genius, he doesn’t gloss over his troubled family relationships or his treatment of his employees. There is a journalistic aspect to the book which makes you smile and wince at the same time, because it so clearly must be true.

The book is also, unfortunately, flawed. Originally intended for publication in March 2012, its release date was moved to November 21st 2011, and later another month back to October. Though it sprawls, at 600 pages, Steve Jobs feels like the result of compromises made to tap into the media frenzy following Jobs’s passing.

It’s often repetitive or redundant, and the themes Isaacson has drawn from Jobs’s life - the way his trip to India and youthful experiments with LSD fed into his working life, for example - are hammered into readers’ skulls with little subtlety. All this is a pity, because, as Isaacson shows, Jobs was the sort of man who could look at a product two weeks before the release date, decide that ‘it’s shit’, and work, with his team, inhuman hours in redesigning it. Steve Jobs believed in making no compromises, and he deserved better than this.