Image: Jim Wilson/Redux Pictures
In 1977, 22-year-old Steve Jobs introduced the world to one of the first self-contained personal computers, the Apple II. The machine was a bold departure from previous products built to perform specific tasks: turn it on, and there was only a blinking cursor awaiting further instruction. Some owners were inspired to program the machines themselves, but others could load up software written and shared or sold by others more skilled or inspired.
Later, when Apple’s early lead in the industry gave way to IBM, Jobs and company fought back with the now classic Super Bowl advertisement promising a break from the alleged Orwellian ubiquity of Big Blue. “Unless Apple does it, no one will be able to innovate except IBM,” said Jobs’s handpicked CEO John Sculley.
In 1984 Jobs delivered the Macintosh. The blinking cursor was gone. Unlike prior PCs, the Mac was useful even without adding software. Turn it on, and the first thing it did, literally, was smile.
Under this friendly exterior, the Mac retained the essence of the Apple II and the IBM PCs: outside developers could write software and share it directly with users.
The rise of the Internet brought a new dimension to this openness. Users could run new code within seconds of encountering it online. This was deeply empowering but also profoundly dangerous. The cacophony of available code began to include viruses and spyware that can ruin a PC—or make the experience of using one so miserable that alternatives seem attractive.
Jobs’s third big new product introduction came 30 years after his first. It paid homage to both fashion and fear. The iPhone, unveiled in 2007, did for mobile phones what the Mac did for PCs and the iPod did for MP3 players, setting a new standard for ease of use, elegance and cool. But the iPhone dropped the fundamental feature of openness. Outsiders could not program it. “We define everything that is on the phone,” Jobs said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone, and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore.”
Being closed to outsiders made the iPhone reliable and predictable. In that first year those who dared hack the phone to add features or to make it compatible with providers other than AT&T risked having it “bricked”—completely and permanently disabled— on the next automatic update from Apple. It was a far cry from the Apple II’s ethos, and it raised objections.
Jobs answered his critics with the App Store in 2008. Outside coders were welcomed back, and thousands of apps followed. But new software has to go through Apple, which takes a 30 percent cut, along with 30 percent of new content sales such as magazine subscriptions. Apple reserves the right to kill any app or content it doesn’t like. No more surprises.
As goes the iPhone, so perhaps goes the world. The nerds of today are coding for cool but tethered gizmos, like the iPhone, and Web 2.0 platforms, like Facebook and Google Apps—attractive all, but controlled by their makers in a way even the famously proprietary Bill Gates never achieved with Windows. Thanks to iCloud and other services, the choice of a phone or tablet today may lock a consumer into a branded silo, making it hard for him or her to do what Apple long importuned potential customers to do: switch.
Such walled gardens can eliminate what we now take for granted and what Jobs originally represented: a world in which mainstream technology can be influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field and without intermediation. Today control increasingly rests with the legislators and judges who discipline platform makers. Enterprising law-enforcement officers with a warrant can flick a distant switch and turn a standard mobile phone into a roving mic or eavesdrop on occupants of cars equipped with travel assistance systems. These opportunities are arising not only in places under the rule of law but also in authoritarian states.
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6 Comments
Add CommentAfter you realize that Steve Jobs walked into Xerox PARC and walked out with Alan Kay's interface for the MAC; he seems less saintly. Thievery, or the ends justify the means? Is that the hallmark of greatness? I was pleasantly surprised that this was included in his biography. Jobs was great at manipulating the masses. Unfortunately, that's what most people want. Steve knew most people couldn't handle personal responsibility for their lives and wasn't afraid to use it. The freedom Steve Jobs gave you was always Steve Jobs' version of reality and most were happy to go along and paid dearly for that version. Steve Jobs played all of you; he was always on Steve Jobs side. Hey, but don't listen to me, I'm just the voice of reason.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt always amazes me how the Jobs worshipers always jump right over Job’s big failures. This author skips right to the 3rd big thing, iPhone, NO it was not the 3rd big thing! The Next computer was his next big thing and it was a big FAIL. No one remember that great square, black box that had no software and cost 5 times what every other PC on the market cost?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHe was a great promoter and marketing guy, but electronics design? No, not even close.
Like many of the titans of industry who came before him, Steve Jobs was a bully whose admiration by millions of Americans is more than a little frightening. Both Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were controlling autocrats whose inventions and the infrastructure changes necessary to use their inventions have both transformed and wreaked havoc on the planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLike the Devil in a fable of old, these executives may have started out tinkering, but within a matter of decades became corporate titans who offered humanity magical gifts if they gave up money, land, and the air we breathe. As pointed out by one of the other comments posted here, Jobs was not an engineer: he was a salesman. Yet the myth of the independent entrepreneur and inventor remains strong in the United States where most of us believe in a version of history I like to call myth-story.
Edison, Ford, and Jobs all are titans in these myths.
But they are terrible individuals to emulate.
The problem with our economics is it is irrational. We have a copyright law that makes little sense, because it restricts economic activity. I don't advocate piracy, but the absurdity of having copyright extensions that go back to 1924 is patently clear (as patents clearly show--Lipitor is famously available as a generic this week--because patent law only protects owners for a couple of decades).
Apple's system is like the copyright laws. Its closed nature precludes innovation "outside the box". This is terrible for renewal, and offers a lousy model for those who live in the real world where turbulence and crashes in the stock market-- like tsunamis and earthquakes-- are part and parcel of what makes our planet the place it is.
How many times do we have to go through this? Apple negotiated and paid for what I believe were two visits. Xerox received pre-IPO stock. Hey, theVoiceOfReason, do you have original ideas yourself or do you troll web sites trying to promote whatever loser canard you can latch onto?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this" In that first year those who dared hack the phone to add features or to make it compatible with providers other than AT&T risked having it “bricked”—completely and permanently disabled— on the next automatic update from Apple. It was a far cry from the Apple II’s ethos, and it raised objections."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course there is always a chance that a phone where you're flashed the firmware or baseband won't upgrade correctly to a new version of the OS. That's also true of anyone doing the same on Android, for example by using CyanogenMod.
But there is absolutely no evidence whatever that Apple *intentionally* "bricked" jailbroken phones. What they have always done is close the security holes which allowed people to jailbreak their phones in the first place.
Even demigods have feet of clay; whether their shortcomings are sufficient to dethrone them must be left to the individual. FDR and JFK retain their crowns in spite of behavior that today would be, as the saying goes, "immediately disqualifying" in a prospective president.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJobs? Time will tell, although Apple fanitics are a dedicated bunch.
Oh, BTW...will I ever get Flash on my iPhone?