What has Steve jobs actually done?
i just read the official biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
Well, I have seen a lot of Steve Jobs Lovers and Haters, and I, to be honest am somewhere in the middle.
Lets dig in Steve Jobs life a little deeper. A lot of haters generally show us the facts that kind of make us think of Jobs as an imposter. There is some truth to that, obviously.
He couldn’t write code.
He wasn’t an engineer.
He wasn’t a designer.
But what he was, is a passionate person who deeply believed that he was changing the world and changing it for the better.
Lets have a look at the original Mac.
Steve Jobs actually is one of the design patent-holders of the original Macintosh. This is probably one of the huge point to the haters. How could he have the design patent even though he didn’t have the slightest idea of formal designing?
But in the book, I was kinda amazed by the maniacal perfection of Jobs.
In creating the case for the original Macintosh, which came out in 1984, Jobs worked with two young designers at Apple, Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama, who drafted a preliminary design and had a plaster model made. The Mac team gathered around for the unveiling and expressed their thoughts. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the software engineers, called it “cute.” Others also seemed satisfied. Then Jobs let loose a blistering burst of criticism. “It’s way too boxy, it’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bevel.” -Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Snippet taken from Smithaonian Magazine)
He was extremely picky about the original Macintosh’s grey color, too. He was shown 2000 shades of gray. Didn’t like any of them and tried to make his own version of grey (didn’t end up doing so).
Every month or so, the designers would come up with a new prototype, Jobs wouldn’t like any of them. He even cried a few times to make the designers make it better.
In ‘85, jobs was fired from Apple, after losing a power battle with the board. when he came back in the early 90’s, Apple was months away from being insolvent. Then, he wanted to make 4 new products, based on the consumers need. One of them was the iMac, the product that redefined Apple.
Here, we again see his maniacal obsession with making the best product ever. If you read the book, you’ll see him constantly forcing the engineers and the designers to “Do it better”.
In a scene, we see him crying because the CD tray was kind of horrible, according to him, but there was no time to redesign.
I saw the same obsession when it came to Apple Stores, the iPod and the iPhone.
The human touch we see today in Apple was possible because of Jobs obsession with perfection and simplicity.
Yes, it wasn’t only Jobs who did it all. He wasn’t God. But he certainly wasn’t the devil either.
I highly recommend you to read Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson . Its an amazing book, especially for wannabe entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts. plus it will help to curb the lockdown boredom, I guess.
