Steve Jobs who designed Apple for the current generation
Reviewing the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.
Another draft post from 2017. I honestly had loaded up quite a few draft posts then, thinking that I was going to be blogging often and all that. If I’m right, it was because I had come back from a holiday trip and I was really in this motivated mood to keep creating. I really have these ups and downs in my creativity. It’s a little frustrating when it’s down, but it’s so tiring to keep when it’s actually on going.
Did Apple shape the world, or was Apple shaped by the world? Meaning was it a range of factors that led to Steve Jobs developing the company the way that we currently know it? Or was it this new way of thinking that Apple introduced into the mainstream?
The biography on Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson covers a lot of interesting ground. I personally enjoyed the thought processes and how Isaacson had portrayed Jobs in the best and worst light. The influences from his childhood and teenage wandering years really showed that there was a huge possibility of how things could grow in the years to come. Perhaps it was the way that Isaacson had put it, an event causing something to change in Jobs, which led to more events, and more changes. The cause and effect of the world on Steve Jobs: disappointments, achievements and successes. The pure madness surrounding the man as well. It really spoke volumes, and I still remember large portions of the book, four years on.
Apple’s effect on how we see the world right now gives us a clear understanding that people do appreciate the appropriate amount of simplicity. There is such a thing as oversimplifying, within the engineering and design realms. And at the same time, there is a chance of it being over designed, where something is unnecessarily complicated. Both are areas to easily fall into, but the bare minimum that Apple gives is usually enough.
“Enough“ is a term that evaded a lot of computer hardware developers at that time, and even now. There’s always this statement I hear whenever comparing a Mac build to a PC build, “For the price of the Mac, I could build a PC with much greater specs.“ That statement is definitely true. But it holds some other assumptions: you need to build the PC yourself. That’s something a lot of people are not willing to get into, especially in a very simple consumer market. It’s the same reason people look at me funny when I build custom keyboards. Why do you want to put yourself through the hassle? So it’s not that I don’t understand the need for customizing, I am happy to pay the price for a Mac because at its build level, its enough for me. In fact, if Apple chases the top tier graphics and processing speeds, they end up chasing the wrong crowd. They’re here to make sure their computers provide you with just enough to get your YouTube career going, for you to play enough games within their Apple Ecosystem. The aim is not for overclocking your PC or to run a server, although both are possible with a bit of research.
To echo the sentiments stated in the biography, the home brew crowd that were building their own PCs then were so frustrated and upset with Apple for developing a system that could not have added integrations, and was a one piece self contained unit. That was the mantra from the beginning. Right to repair or not, Apple did not want you to touch their carefully engineered equipment that would fit snug right into the chassis of their choice. The freedom of choice you got from the beginning was to choose to buy Apple or not.
I found that the simplicity of design that Apple brings, gives reason for a lot of other companies to either simplify, or just go to the tech extremes. Recent phones and tech coming out have become a lot simpler, but without their own issues. The simplicity forgets that Apple designed with the consumer in mind, the person who might not have any idea how to do what they would want to do. That latent need that would be fulfilled through Apple alone. That’s how the simplicity works towards.
Some companies are getting it, because now it’s been a long time since Apple started. Working on the latent needs of a consumer could be put through AI, which is what Google is doing to us now. We have our data mined, and the computer gods give us our algorithm based decisions. That’s a good try, a nice attempt at trying to understand the human mind.
But at the end of it, Steve Jobs made his things because he wanted something like that himself. He himself was the consumer that he was trying to reach out to. From the onset, he was never the computer developer. He was the kid who was hyped about the computer things, and he enjoyed his life, somewhat. At the heart of it, if the companies do not want the items for themselves, and want it as the best product they could think of, it would not be easy to develop that latent need. It’s something that one really has to want. That’s something that either a lot of self reflection can get, or a lot of self dissonance will reveal.
Do we know what we want though? As the current generations who have had their latent needs fulfilled, are we sure we know what is going on? I, for one, have no idea what I would love to see, and I try my best to dig deep often to figure out. I have tried and I constantly dive into multiple new hobbies, only to come out broke and still unsure if that’s the right thing for the future.
But I still live as a consumer, thinking about what is nice and fancy. There are products that are just enough, like the Mac I’m typing this into, with the keyboards that I currently have. There are products that remain good enough, like my iPhone SE1 and 2. I might want the next few Apple products, but I still struggle to see the need to get a PC, other than for the games that I might want to play. Those aren’t needs, but they’re still at the back of my mind somewhere. Maybe one day, I would go towards a fully custom everything in life. Right now, I’ll enjoy my Apple Ecosystem.