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counting the board members rooting for professional software.
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I completely understand your point of view. I know that Apple is honoring watch enthusiasts on some level, but I think the Starting at $349 watch would have done just the same.
Tim Wilson also thinks I’m a fool for not “understanding” this new Apple ethos.
I guess we will agree to disagree on this one!
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[Jeremy Garchow] ““Eichler did a great thing,” Jobs told me on one of our walks around his old neighborhood, which featured homes in the Eichler style. “His houses were smart and cheap and good. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people.” His appreciation for Eichler-style homes, Jobs said, instilled his passion for making sharply designed products for the mass market. “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the Eichlers. “It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.”
“that’s a killer quote.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “that’s a killer quote.”
It’s also entirely untrue.
The Mac was among the most expensive personal computers at the time. It was most definitely NOT intended as a mass market product, nor was it a mainstream product at Apple.
Apple’s mainstream development and marketing was on the Apple II, which absolutely WAS a mass market product, and held a market share that Mac has yet to achieve more than half of.
Clean and simple, yes, but his ability to rewrite his own story on the fly was unparalleled. It was so common that the people around him came up with a name for it: the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. The term certainly came to represent other things, including Steve’s motivational abilities and general charisma….but it doesn’t change for a minute that he’d make this stuff up about himself to suit whatever he wanted you to think about him at the time.
He used it repeatedly over the years to simultaneously piss on what his competitors were doing, while providing aircover for himself to do it later. It served the additional function of getting the people who loved him to NOT buy these features from other people, but to instead wait for Apple to provide them.
The first example was in fact the original Mac, introduced in black and white on a 9-inch screen, despite the fact that larger, color screens were already common. Graphic artists don’t want to work in color, Steve said, so there was no color Mac. Graphic artists want to work on a screen about the width of a piece of paper. Needless to say, immediately after being fired from Apple, the computer company he started had ONLY color monitors, and much wider than a piece of paper.
Here are some others:
Just before Apple announced the iPad mini, Steve Jobs:
“[A 7-inch tablet] is meaningless unless your tablet includes sandpaper,” Jobs said, “so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.” He said 7-inch screens were actually 45 per cent the size of an iPad, which wasn’t sufficient.
“Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff,” he added. “There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touchscreen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum.”
Of course, long before that, in 2003, he pissed on the idea of tablets at all.
It turns out people want keyboards. I mean, when I started in this business one of the biggest challenges was that people couldn’t type. And one day we realized that death would eventually take care of this. And so, people know how to type now. And if you do email of any volume, you gotta have a keyboard.
So we look at the tablet and we think it’s gonna fail.
The follow-up was maybe, but tablets are good for reading and he replied with one of my favorite quotes of his:
It’s really true, if you’ve got a bunch or rich guys who can afford their third computers. You know they’ve got their desktop, they got a portable, and now they got one of these to read with, that’s your market.
People accuse US of niche markets!
So not only does he want YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that tablets are a non-starter, he wants YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that people with tablets are hipster d-bags…until of course Apple releases one.
And another classic quote on why he didn’t support video on the original iPod, when this was already common from other vendors.
It turns out that watching movies on a tiny screen isn’t very much fun. The best way to watch movies is to buy a personal computer.
I’m certain that many of you Applephiles will retort that this was all strategic disinformation. Perhaps.
But the BIGGEST part of the smokescreen was aimed at YOU. The feature doesn’t exist, and if it exists, is exclusively the domain of hyper-affluent d-bags with bad taste….until we bring it to you next year, when it will be yet another triumph of the Apple innovation you hold so dear.
A genius, yes, but, like many geniuses, maybe most geniuses, a self-aggrandizing borderline sociopath whose greatest creation is himself.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “that’s a killer quote.”
It’s also entirely untrue.
The Mac was among the most expensive personal computers at the time. It was most definitely NOT intended as a mass market product, nor was it a mainstream product at Apple.
Apple’s mainstream development and marketing was on the Apple II, which absolutely WAS a mass market product, and held a market share that Mac has yet to achieve much more than half of. And it had a color screen!
Is any mass market product a success if it hasn’t reached the mass of the market? Maybe so, but it certainly flies in the face of Steve’s later contention that Apple didn’t want the biggest marketshare. He used BMW as his example of a company with only 3% market share whose success was indisputable.
Hmmmm…Apple like a luxury car maker. Perhaps one whose products represent a degree of status accorded by, among other things, their price. Hmmmm…..
Mac was clean and simple, yes, but his ability to rewrite his own story on the fly was unparalleled. It was so common that the people around him came up with a name for it: the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. The term certainly came to represent other things, including Steve’s motivational abilities and general charisma….but it doesn’t change for a minute that he’d make this stuff up about himself to suit whatever he wanted you to think about him at the time.
He used it repeatedly over the years to simultaneously piss on what his competitors were doing, while providing aircover for himself to do it later. It served the additional function of getting the people who loved him to NOT buy these features from other people, but to instead wait for Apple to provide them.
The first example was in fact the original Mac, introduced in black and white on a 9-inch screen, despite the fact that larger, color screens were already common. Graphic artists don’t want to work in color, Steve said, so there was no color Mac. Graphic artists want to work on a screen about the width of a piece of paper. Needless to say, immediately after being fired from Apple, the computer company he started had ONLY color monitors, and much wider than a piece of paper.
Here are some others:
Just before Apple announced the iPad mini, Steve Jobs:
“[A 7-inch tablet] is meaningless unless your tablet includes sandpaper,” Jobs said, “so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.” He said 7-inch screens were actually 45 per cent the size of an iPad, which wasn’t sufficient.
“Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff,” he added. “There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touchscreen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum.”
Of course, long before that, in 2003, he pissed on the idea of tablets at all.
It turns out people want keyboards. I mean, when I started in this business one of the biggest challenges was that people couldn’t type. And one day we realized that death would eventually take care of this. And so, people know how to type now. And if you do email of any volume, you gotta have a keyboard.
So we look at the tablet and we think it’s gonna fail.
The follow-up was maybe, but tablets are good for reading and he replied with one of my favorite quotes of his:
It’s really true, if you’ve got a bunch or rich guys who can afford their third computers. You know they’ve got their desktop, they got a portable, and now they got one of these to read with, that’s your market.
People accuse US of niche markets!
So not only does he want YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that tablets are a non-starter, he wants YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that people with tablets are hipster d-bags…until of course Apple releases one.
And another classic quote on why he didn’t support video on the original iPod, when this was already common from other vendors.
It turns out that watching movies on a tiny screen isn’t very much fun. The best way to watch movies is to buy a personal computer.
I’m certain that many of you Applephiles will retort that this was all strategic disinformation. Perhaps.
But the BIGGEST part of the smokescreen was aimed at YOU. The feature doesn’t exist, and if it exists, is exclusively the domain of hyper-affluent d-bags with bad taste….until we bring it to you next year, when it will be yet another triumph of the Apple innovation you hold so dear.
A genius, yes, but, like many geniuses, maybe most geniuses, a self-aggrandizing borderline sociopath whose greatest creation is himself.
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[Tim Wilson] “He used it repeatedly over the years to simultaneously piss on what his competitors were doing, while providing aircover for himself to do it later. It served the additional function of getting the people who loved him to NOT buy these features from other people, but to instead wait for Apple to provide them.”
Video on the iPod was one of my personal favorites as was Jobs being dismissive of flash media in MP3 players (before Apple started using it though).
I think my all time favorite is when Jobs was interviewed by the NY Times and said the Kindle would be a failure because people didn’t read any more (that was in 2008). The reason this one sticks out in my mind so much is because when Apple later released the iPad and Jobs was on stage talking about what a great eReader the iPad was he actually gave props to Amazon and the Kindle. Never thought I’d see that.
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[Tim Wilson] “It’s also entirely untrue.”
[Tim Wilson] ” the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.”
[Tim Wilson] “But the BIGGEST part of the smokescreen was aimed at YOU. The feature doesn’t exist, and if it exists, is exclusively the domain of hyper-affluent d-bags with bad taste….until we bring it to you next year, when it will be yet another triumph of the Apple innovation you hold so dear.
“There’s no doubt the Jobs was a showman. I bet he was hard to work with, hard to follow, hard to please. I completely understand that there’s a flip side to the coin. It’s not perfect.
But if you strip all of that away and focus on what Apple became, and the products delivered, not on a feature by feature checkbox basis, but what was actually delivered, you see that Apple does offer competitively priced goods and services, usually in a well designed and well built package, along with a very decent user experience.
In my mind, no matter what you like or don’t like about Jobs, the Joseph Eichler quote has some truth to it, even if it took Apple a while to get there. My view on this is much less maniacal, but it seems to me that’s what Jobs wanted for Apple, and he eventually got it. Rose colored glasses, and all that.
Now, it’s 9 hour crafted, hand rubbed, gold bracelets.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “the Joseph Eichler quote has some truth to it, even if it took Apple a while to get there.”
That’s not what Steve said. He said that’s what he did when he introduced Mac. This was an out and out lie/reminaging/retelling/misremebering/remythologizing, WHATEVER. But not not not not true.
The only products for which it was ever true had an “i” in front, and to that extent, his statement expressed an aspiration…which is also not what he said, and begs the question of the extent to which he wanted even iMac to be for the masses, or the extent of his failure that it’s not.
And I think very highly of iMac mind you. But the whole “for the masses” thing was him blowing smoke up his own skirt.
[Jeremy Garchow] “My view on this is much less maniacal,”
None of the facts I mentioned are in dispute. They’re all Steve’s words, and they’re all in context. You can LIKE him more than I do, but those are in fact the words of an actual maniac in the clinical sense. Removing any pejorative sense of the word, but speaking as a former clinician, he was at LEAST hypomanic…and, as I mentioned, most geniuses are, if not hyPERmanic. Again not the least pejorative. Mentally stable people tend not to be revolutionaries.
I was merely calling Steve out for glibly reciting a myth of himself that never happened.
But as a self-aggrandizing borderline sociopath myself, I deeply admire him. I just wished that, unlike Steve, I’d been able to make some money from it. LOL
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[Tim Wilson] “That’s not what Steve said. He said that’s what he did when he introduced Mac. This was an out and out lie/reminaging/retelling/misremebering/remythologizing, WHATEVER. But not not not not true.”
He said he “tried” to do it with the first Mac, and did it with the iPod. He didn’t say he did it with the first Mac.
Again, Jobs was a showman. As far as I know, there isn’t an old adage that says, show me a showman and I’ll show you a truth sayer.
There’s no doubt that much of the sales pitch is trumped and inflated, Jobs was not a diety, but I tend to believe that Jobs DID set out to achieve a version of the quoted goal, and the proof is in the products that were delivered. Apple could have set out to make shitty products at the cheapest prices just as easily.
If you remove Jobs’ quotes from the discussion and look what happened with Mac products, prices, and popularity, (that is to say, look at the results) I would say that Apple did achieve putting well designed products at reasonable prices (not the cheapest) in the hands of as many people as they could.
Surely, Jobs used the Eichner analogy at an opportunistic time. Good show.
I see your point where he revised his own history, and yeah, perhaps Jobs was simply crazy. But, I also don’t see literal gold blocks and 9 hour bracelets in Jobs’ history, either.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “He didn’t say he did it with the first Mac”
yes – but if you read the accounts of its creation – which I know you have, so this is for conversation – he was insane to make it a well designed affordable appliance. Emphasis on affordable appliance. he had them look at italian made cooking appliances for gods sake. That’s why he refused to allow more than 128K of memory. For cost. his heart was in the right place. But he made his staff’s lives a living hell trying to work miracles.
he tried to bend physics and economics on the first mac – because his overwhelming goal was to alter the experience of millions – with real typography, a revolutionary interface, ease of use – all the stuff everyone knows.
One of my favourite stories is that in later years he had a pretty bucolic home life with wife and children – and that one time he lead dinner table discussions on a proper washing machine for the house for weeks. That sounds like it could be boring, but I doubt he was a boring dinner party conversationalist.
Or how he would come out of the house like a kid when Larry Ellison, one of his closest friends, would drive around in an insanely expensive car. He’d laugh with him and coo over the car – but you never saw him indulge that kind of materialism.
I’m pretty sure he could be and was a monster to any number of people, but according to those that knew him, never to his family. He apparently reared pretty excellent empathic children and his wife looked to love him a lot.
And he would not have sanctioned that hand rubbed twice as hard as gold wrist bauble. he would have made the one device and charged what he felt was a proper price. He would have screamed at his entire staff for half a decade – stabbing at a whiteboard five times a week and throwing pens at them until he felt it was the thing it was actually supposed to be. I don’t personally think that watch has a clear sense of what it is or what it is for.
And the gold one is a crass error – but we’ve both said that any number of times. Tim still believes it reveals the heart and soul of apple I think, but i’d argue the opposite. I personally think it goes against apple’s marrow.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Or how he would come out of the house like a kid when Larry Ellison, one of his closest friends, would drive around in an insanely expensive car. He’d laugh with him and coo over the car – but you never saw him indulge that kind of materialism.”
Expensive is relative but Jobs’ signature ride was an Mercedes SL55 AMG. He famously leased a new one every six months so he never had to get a license plate for the car. He also had an aluminum-hulled, 260ft custom yacht built but it wasn’t completed until after his passing.
There were certainly others that flaunted their wealth more, but Jobs certainly had some expensive, big boy toys.
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