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What happens to The Fab Four without Steve Jobs?

A few months after Steve died, Wall Street Journal and Fortune writer Brent Schlender was cleaning out the all the crap from his storage shed. As is typical of such an exercise, Brent found some lost treasure that had suddenly gained some currency of late: hours and hours of unedited tapes from his interviews with Steve. During some of these tapes, one can hear Steve's kids running around the kitchen as the two men talked. Occasionally Steve would hit the pause button before saying something that may come back and bite him on the ass. Most of the content of the "Lost Steve Jobs Tapes" was re-worded stuff he has previously told others, or it was sound but boring business advice that left me a little sleepy. However, there was one juicy morsel that I enjoyed most of all. It was the uncut version of Steve’s model for good management inspired by the Beatles:

My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people In the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies. They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don't know what Ringo did. [1]

Within five months of Steve’s death, the "Paul McCartney" of Apple, Tim Cook, trotted on stage and looked as if he may intro the new 4G iPad. Everyone drew a breath knowing that poor Tim ain't gonna woo the crowd the way that Steve did. Luckily, Tim copped out and handballed the task like a hot potato to his marketing dude, Phil Schiller - Apple's "Ringo Starr". Phil’s excited nerd-ologue worked better than Valium to put this author to sleep. So I may have missed the part where he admits that the fancy high-speed 4G functionality only works with Northern American 4G networks. Aussie customers were offered a well-deserved refund after finding out that the major selling-point is a major let-down. Imagine how they felt after days of lining up for this pricey gadget - the second time within a year - only to discover that it’s only marginally better than the last gadget? Perhaps I give too much credit to fanboys to think objectively when they are too busy Thinking Differently.

Apple seems to be chugging along well in the competent hands of Tim - its best bean-counter; but what of Apple's creative soul? What about Apple's "George Harrison"? Jonathan Ive’s name is still on Apple’s site, so he doesn’t seem to be jumping ship. Jony spoke about working with Steve at his funeral. He smiled as he said that during brainstorming sessions Steve would often come up with a lot of “dopey ideas,” along with good ones too.[2]

When John Lennon died, Yoko went into publicity overdrive. However, Mrs Laurene Jobs has much more class than the pseudo-artist. Laurene has retreated even further from the public spotlight since she lost her husband. She appeared in the news media only once at Obama's State of the Union address. Laurene sat with Warren Buffett's secretary, Debbie Bosanekas. The President pointed out that Debbie pays a higher income tax percentage than her obscenely wealthy boss. He then boldly asked that the rich pay more tax. [3]

Laurene is now the 100^th richest person in the world with a net worth of $9 billion. She beat her late husband, Steve, who was only (only?) ranked 110 at 8.3 Billion. [4]

After Steve spent his career building a rep as a miserly Scrooge, it warms the heart to know that his fortune is now solely in the hands of probably the world’s most quietly hard-working philanthropist.

[1] Schlender, B. (2012, April 17) The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes. From From FastCompany.com. Retrieved from: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/165/steve-jobs-legacy-tapes

[2] Wingfield, N. (2011,October 17) Emotion, Music and Humor at Steve Jobs Memorial. New York Times.

[3] Earle, G. & Shields, G. (2012, January 25) O uses Buffett’s Gal Friday as a speech prop. The New York Post.

[4] Mac, R. (2012, March 7) Meet Silicon Valley's Richest Woman: Laurene Powell Jobs. Forbes Magazine

Laptop killer

During the 2007 AllThingsD, both Bill Gates and Steve were interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher from The Wall Street Journal. Kara asks Bill about the future of computing:

Kara: What does that device look like in five years? What would be your principal device? Is there one or…

Walt: I could be wrong, I think you carry a tablet with you, right?

Bill: Right.

Walt: Which has not necessarily stormed the world yet.

Bill: Yeah. This is like Windows 1992, I think. That is, I’m unrepentant on my belief.”

Steve fidgets and swings his chair restlessly. Occasionally a Mona Lisa grin appears as if he is bursting with something to say; but keeps quiet.

Walt: What’s your device in five years that you rely on the most.

Bill: I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that.

Kara: Light.

Bill: Yeah. I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor…

Bill is an open book. He expands on this tablet idea. Steve keeps quiet despite himself. What is he hiding?

Bill: Yeah, I’d say it’s a healthy period… we’ll look back at this as one of the great periods of invention.

Finally, Steve interjects. He can’t keep quiet anymore.

Steve: I think so, too. There’s a lot of things that are risky right now, which is always a good sign, you know, and you can see through them, you can see to the other side and go, yes, this could be huge, but there’s a period of risk that, you know, nobody’s ever done it before.

Kara: Do you have an example?

Steve: I do, but I can’t say.

Kara: OK.

Steve: But I can say, when you feel like that, that’s a great thing.

Kara: Right.

Steve: That’s what keeps you coming to work in the morning and it tells you there’s something exciting around the next corner.[1]

Three years later, Steve unveiled his iPad – a tablet that exceeded even Bill’s expectations. It was basically a big iPhone that can’t make calls. New Yorkers would recognise it as the same touchscreen tablet that cab drivers have been using for years – only this was has a picture of an apple on the back, but no USB jack.

At All ThingsD, three years later, Steve confided to Kara and Walt,

I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multi-touch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our people about it, and six months later, they came back with this amazing display, and I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He got [the rubber band] scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the iPhone.”[2]

One r/evolution at a time, huh, Steve?

However, that’s not the whole story of the iPad’s genesis:

Another former Apple executive who was there at the time said the tablets kept getting shelved at Apple because Mr. Jobs, whose incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.[3]

The day after the AllThingsD conference, “Post PC Era” was the headline story on all the tech news sites that mattered: Mashable, cNet, InformationWeek, Wired, PC Mag, and CNN. Walt from Wall Street Journal called the iPad a “pretty close” laptop killer.[4] Michael Arrington of TechCrunch said, "The iPad beats even my most optimistic expectations. This is a new category of device. But it also will replace laptops for many people.”[5] Steven Levy from Wired wrote, “The iPad is the first embodiment of an entirely new category, one that Jobs hopes will write the obituary for the computing paradigm that Apple itself helped develop”.[6]

The iPad's most creative review came, not from a tech head, but from someone Steve would prefer to impress, the architecture and design editor of The Guardian, Jonathan Glancey:

…I can only say that the universally-hyped iPad looks very much like a giant iPhone.

....Computer and communication buffs will have to tell us how well the iPad performs. If it works as well as it probably does, then it will sell like hot cakes – raising the perennially fascinating issue of why so very many people, worldwide, otherwise oblivious to such coolly sophisticated design, will fork out good money for Apple's latest gizmo. Because it's a gizmo is the most probable answer. Would a Jonathan Ive or Dieter Rams style house, or pad I should say, sell as well? I very much doubt it.

...Meanwhile, expect to read – many times over – of how Steve Jobs really did look like a contemporary Moses at the product launch, coming down from Apple's very own Mt Horeb with what many computer pundits said would be called the iTablet. The iPad will do many things, yet I doubt if it will allow users to talk to burning bushes or strike water from a rock. With the hype surrounding this coolly sophisticated gizmo, you might expect nothing less.[7]

The following month, Apple finally surpassed Microsoft as the world’s largest technology company.[8]

For so long Moore’s Law dictated that everything IT gets faster and cheaper with each new upgrade. This was always great news for customers. Unfortunately, all this great value was bad news for profiteers like Apple whose business model depends upon bad value. Steve’s greatest unacknowledged achievement was defying Moore’s Law. This was not meant to happen for another decade.[9] The gimmick he needed was the iPad’s wafer thin touchscreen. Legions of customers found that molesting an oleophobic screen was so seductive that they were happy to let their infinitely more powerful laptops gather dust as they take a massive step backward in mobile computing.

For thirty bucks less, one could easily purchase a Lenovo (IBM) Core i5 laptop. It’s six inches bigger than iPad’s screen. It has a three times faster CPU than iPad. It has an eight times bigger hard drive than even the largest iPad. Not to mention, the laptop has HDMI, and it burns DVDs. Better value, huh? Sorry, but value just doesn’t get a customer’s juices flowing like caressing a cool Gorilla Glass surface that reacts to your every touch.

[1]Israelson, A. (2007, May 31) TRANSCRIPT–Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at D5. d5.allthingsd.com. Retrieved from http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/

[2] Paczkowski, J. (2010, June 1) Apple CEO Steve Jobs Live at D8: All We Want to Do is Make Better Products. All Things Digital. Retrieved from http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/

[3] Stone, B. & Vance, A. (2009, October 4) Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC. New York Times.

[4] Mossberg, W. (2010, March 31) Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close. Wall Street Journal.

[5] Arrington, M. (2010, April 2) The Unauthorised TechCrunch iPad review. TechCrunch.com. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/02/the-unauthorized-techcrunch-ipad-review/

[6]Kahney, L. (2010, March 22) How The Tablet Will change The World. Wired Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/ff_tablet_levy

[7]The Guardian. (2010, January 27) The Apple iPad: reactions

[8]Tweney, D. (2010, May 26) Apple Passes Microsoft as World’s Largest Tech Company. Wired Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/apple-passes-microsoft/

[9] Kanellos, M. (2005, April 19) New Life for Moore’s Law. Cnet.com. retrieved from: http://news.cnet.com/New-life-for-Moores-Law/2009-1006_3-5672485.html

Jonathan Ive: Steve Jobs' successor?

The press were wondering who will take over when Steve is no longer there. Fortune Magazine, Cnet, and Engadget published articles that looked to Jonathan Ive as heir to the kingdom. Each article recognises the head designer as the catalyst behind the products that saved and strengthened Apple.

The company’s batting rate for both sales and design awards has skyrocketed since Jonathan joined the team. At first, Jonathan almost quit Apple whose leadership under Gil Amelio had overlooked Jony’s ideas. When Steve returned to the helm, he embraced the Brit and the rest is silicon history. Apple’s website describes Jonathan as “reporting directly to the CEO” – a gentle reminder that his stellar ideas still require Steve’s royal seal. Not unlike a rare bird kept in a cage, Jony labours away in a studio forbidden to most Apple staff.[1]

Jonathan chooses to live further away from the office than Steve. His house is deep in the forest among the Twin Peaks mountains where he raises twin boys with his wife, Heather - a writer of histories. He finds solace in watching episodes of The Office – a British satire that exposes the puerile politics of working in a corporate beehive.[2] After two decades of working magic for Apple, there is only one lonely book on the market written about him: Jonathan Ive: Designer of the iPod [3]. You can imagine the hours of brainstorming that went into that inspired title. The book is aimed at high schoolers and only one person bothered to give a review of two stars on Amazon.com. The main obstacle to biographers is that Jonathan seldom speaks to anyone. Apple won’t even release his date of birth. Perhaps they don’t know the date because Jonathan won’t tell them. Interviews with Jonathan are even more scarce than those with Steve. When a journalist is finally granted an audience, he speaks only about the noble philosophy of his craft. He seems tethered by the invisible hand of Steve. British Channel 4 journalist, Nicholas Glass dared to ask him about the defective iPod battery. Patiently, Jonathan leans forward to listen to the question, leans right back, and politely replies,

“Actually not going talk about the battery.”

“Not allowed to?”

“Probably not allowed to.”

Jonathan’s amiable smile broke only for a moment.

Battery issues did not deter Queen Elizabeth II from asking her son, Prince Andrew, to fetch a silver 6 Gig Mini iPod from the Regent Street Apple Store in 2005 (she owns the building).[4] The Monarch was so impressed that the following year she awarded Jonathan the title of Commander of The British Empire.[5] Fellow awardees included fashion legend Vivienne Westwood. His title is two rungs higher than John Lennon's MBE. The singer received the title in '65. Four years later, he met Yoko and decided to make a big silly deal about rejecting his MBE “as a protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against 'Cold Turkey' slipping down the charts”.[6] Unlike Lennon (Steve’s idol), Jonathan accepted his title with good grace like a proper English gentleman. After all, it’s only a New Year’s gift from a nice elderly lady.

Jonathan’s resume looks pretty slick so far. He excelled himself at Northumbria University’s Industrial design course – the same school attended by Steve’s friend, Sting. Two years after the iPod, he stepped into in the sizable footsteps of his idol, Dieter Rams, by receiving The Royal Designer for Industry Award. A year later, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal. The Medal is awarded to “a global ‘big thinker’, an individual who … is deemed by the RSA to be significant to our core enlightenment values of developing human progress.”[7] Colin Powell won the previous year’s medal. When Jonathan won the National Design Award in 2007, Business Week stated “Jonathan Ive and Apple Win Again …It's no surprise Cooper-Hewitt honoured the doyen of computer design”.[8] His iPod and even his lovely and over-over-priced Apple G4 Cube are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His designs sit self-importantly beside other high-minded artistic endeavours such a very large paper clip, a partial photograph of a bag of cat litter, and Dieter Rams’ little Braun T3 transistor radio.

Jonathan was number two on The Daily Telegraph’s 2009 fifty most influential Britons in technology. Number one was Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It’s hard to compete with the guy who invented the world wide web. Number twenty was Stephen Fry who seems to have found a way to twitter his love for Apple even as he sleeps. The Telegraph remarked that Stephen promotes that “a love of technology is an essential part of a sophisticated intellectual life, giving us all an excuse to buy shiny toys that go beep.” [9]

Stephen interviewed Jonathan for his BBC1 television series, Stephen Fry in America. As they both looked over the San Francisco skyline, Stephen asked,

“It could be said that the two most influential Britons of the past thirty years are Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web, and you who’ve given us the iPod and all the train of Apple products. Yet you both choose to live and work in America. I wonder if that says something about Britain or more importantly about America?”

Jony replied, “I think that there's just a conspicuous lack of cynicism and scepticism and ideas are so fragile aren't they? It's so easy to sort of miss an idea, because they can be so quiet, or to snuff an idea out. I think that the sense of the inquisitiveness and the willingness to try is so important for design, for developing those tentative, fragile ideas into a real product.” [10]

Several design companies use this quote to inspire them forward in their endeavours.

Everybody loves Jony. His DJ chum, the prolific John Digweed, marvels at Jony’s humility despite his global status. It took the DJ months before he realised Jonathan was THAT Jonathan.[11] His good friend, elite Australian designer, Marc Newson, gave him one of his five thousand dollar Ikepod timepieces. The man is surrounded by friends, and why not? It’s difficult not to like the softly-spoken gentle giant. You can even buy Jonathan Ive t-shirts. Although they are a little more difficult to find than those emblazoned with Steve’s image. Apple was built by a fierce loner who understood from the very beginning that nice guys finish last.

Jonathan may have the artistic soul of Apple; but Apple’s deluxe products and deluxe price tags require a CEO who can sell deluxe ice to Eskimos (so long as it isn’t cube-shaped ice). Nice guys like Jony aren’t salesmen. No one sells with as much panache and vigour as Steve.

[1]CnnMoney Smartest People in Tech. Smartest Designer: Jonathan Ive. Retrieved from: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/technology/1007/gallery.smartest_people_tech.fortune/6.html

[2] Arlidge, J. (2003, December 21) Father Of Invention. From The Observer Comment in The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1111276,00.html

[3] Hirschmann, K. (2007) Jonathan Ive: Designer of the iPod. Michigan: Kidhaven.

[4] Ricker, T. (2005, June 17) Queen Elizabeth II: diminutive royal, iPod user. Engadget. Retrieved from http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/17/queen-elizabeth-ii-diminutive-royal-ipod-user/

[5] Sullivan, L. (2006, Janaury 3) Apple's iPod Gets Royal Honor. Information Week.

[6] NME (2009, January 6) John Lennon's MBE found in royal vault.

[7] Retrieved from http://www.thersa.org/about-us/history-and-archive/medals/benjamin-franklin-medal

[8] Scanlon, J. & Walters, H.92007, June 7) Jonathan Ive and Apple Win Again. Business Week.

[9] Beere, C. (2009, September 24) The 50 most influential Britons in technology. Daily Telegraph.

[10] BBC1/Sprout Pictures (Producers) (2008)Stephen Fry In America. Episode Six.

[11] Arlidge, J. (2003, December 21) Father Of Invention. From The Observer Comment in The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1111276,00.html

Steve Jobs' estranged marriage of hardware and software

During his keynote announcing the iPhone, Steve quoted Alan Kay, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware… So we're bringing breakthrough software to a mobile device for the first time".[1] After watching the iPhone unveiling, Alan responded in kind to Steve’s homage by stating, “Steve understands desire”.[2]

Steve loves to quote Alan Kay when he’s trying to convince us that the same people who make the hardware should make the software. This is the high horse he mounts whenever he is attacking the fragmented relationship between a HP computer and its Windows software. Steve tries to sell this lovely idea that his hard- and soft-ware guys get together and build a machine as a cohesive team. When the job’s done, they all have a group hug and together they send their baby out into the big scary world. Many hands make light work in a common spirit of integration, right? In reality, Apple is no less fragmented than its competitors. Steve’s obsession with guarding his secret projects means that his “team” consists of a load of people isolated from each other. Each person builds a separate element, with no idea what the final sum of these parts will look like. ''We have cells, like a terrorist organization,'' chuckled Jon Rubinstein, ex-Apple hardware chief, ''Everything is on a need-to-know basis”.[3] Jonathan Ive decried the process in the 2009 documentary, Objectified:

As designers, it’s easy so get so far removed from the actual objects …prototypes can be made remotely …the actual product is manufactured in another continent [China]. It used to be that it was manufactured downstairs and you would develop the product in such a fluid, natural, organic way with how it was going to be made and that’s not the case anymore.[4]

You can understand why Steve likes Jony to keep quiet about how Apple does business.

Fortune Magazine had this to say about the iPhone launch:

Even some senior Apple managers whispered during the keynote that they were seeing the iPhone for the first time… The software development was done without needing to provide a hardware prototype. In some cases, Apple deliberately disguised software builds, known as "stacks", to keep programmers from seeing the actual interface… Cingular [now AT & T] worked with Apple software developer on breakthrough features ... Even so, Apple didn't show Cingular the final iPhone prototype until just weeks before this week's debut. In some cases, Apple crafted bogus handset prototypes to show not just to Cingular executives, but also to Apple's own workers.[5]

Veteran Apple commentator, Leander Kahney of Wired reported that Steve’s secrecy tastes like something out of a John Le Carre spy novel:

Recent stories about how the iPhone was kept secret mentioned tactics like nondisclosure agreements, misinformation and phony prototypes… Jobs also keeps information on a need-to-know basis. Different product groups are told only what they must know to finish their parts of the product. It's a classic cell structure, like a spy organization… Take the iPod name. The only department in Apple that knew the name of the iPod ahead of its unveiling was the graphics department, because it designed the product packaging and advertising materials. Everyone else referred to its code name, "Dulcimer."[6]

“I was at the iPod launch,” said Apple systems Engineer, Edward Eigerman to New York Times. “No one that I worked with saw that coming.” [7]
His marriage of software and hardware is one where husband and wife are told to sleep separately to avoid pillow talk. Steve’s paranoia began with the theft of the Mac GUI. His old marketing guru, Regis McKenna explains to New York Times that Steve’s secrecy runs deep:

But what most people don’t understand is that Steve has always been very personal about his life. He has always kept things close to the vest since I’ve known him, and only confided in relatively few people.[8]

Apple’s secretive honeycomb of blind worker-bees resembles a relic from the industrial-age. It has more in common with dinosaurs like General Motors than its open-minded, open-planned egalitarian neighbours in Silicon Valley. Apple has become what Steve always detested: Big Blue Brother. Are his fashionable customers just another part of the Apple hive mind?

[1] Block, R. (2007, January 9) Live From Macworld 2007: Steve Jobs Keynote [Live blog]. Ngadget.com. Retrieved from http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-jobs-keynote/

[2] Elkind, P. (2008 March 5) The Trouble With Steve Jobs. Fortune Magazine.

[3] Burrows, P. (2000, July 31) Apple: Yes, Steve, you fixed it. Congrats! Now what's Act Two? Business Week.

[4] Swiss Dots (Producer). (2009) Objectified [DVD].

[5] Lewis, P.H. (2007, January 12) How Apple Kept its iPhone Secrets. Fortune Magazine.

[6] Kahney, L. (2007, June 3) Steve Jobs, Spymaster. Wired Magazine.

[7] Stone, B. & Vance, A. (2009, June 22) Apple’s Obsession With Secrecy Grows Stronger. New York Times.

[8] Stone, B. & Vance, A. (2009, June 22) Apple’s Obsession With Secrecy Grows Stronger. New York Times.

The iPod Mystique

It wasn’t just an Mp3 player, the iPod and its cool white tangle-free ear buds became synonymous with the Mp3 player concept, so much so, that even devices made by Apple’s competitors were colloquially referred to as iPods. The iPod’s piece de resistance was its hype. Steve made sure this simple mass-manufactured thing was promoted, not just as another electronic gizmo, but as a work of fine art. The little jukebox was the pampered child of designer, Jonathan Ive. Its euro-minimalist stark white chic was copied from the German 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio designed by Jonathan’s idol, Dieter Rams. The iPod’s signature click-wheel is unapologetically a carbon-copy of the T3’s channel wheel. Dieter was delighted that his famous fan felt ‘inspired’ by him. He said, “I am an admirer of Jonathan Ive's work and I like to take it as a compliment.”[1] In the documentary, Objectified[2], he gushed over Jonathan’s designs. He spoke from his home, a sterile and stark-white modernist take on the Japanese tea-room with a lot less color. He said of Jonathan:

Today you find only a few companies that take design seriously as I see it, and, at the moment that is an American company. It is Apple.

Dieter’s voice rose a notch when his said the word, ‘American’– as if it were a surprise that he were not praising a European company. Dieter has been designing for Braun since the year Steve was born. Back in the T3 days, the wunderkind designer used to sport black turtlenecks like Steve does today. Now Dieter is almost eighty, he no longer requires an arty signature costume because his legend speaks for itself.

Dieter and Braun’s "less is more" mantra of humorless design fetish found a new home in Apple. Like his hero, Jonathan took a fistful of circuitry and wrapped it in puritanical chic. No one was more pleased than his boss. Steve loves minimalism – which is just a nice way of saying idiot-proof.

In Jony and Steve’s haste to lift Euro-styling, they neglected the Braun credo, which was proudly displayed at Dieter’s 2008-2010 international exhibition:

Braun categorically rejects the idea of motivating people to buy its products by adding features that toy with the psychological sub-terrain of the consumer's consciousness. Braun refuses to swell sales by exploiting human frailties: neither its products nor its advertising use such seduction techniques.[3]

Dieter’s products were designed for immortality. If one can afford the auctioneer’s US$800 starting bid, one can pick up a Dieter Rams Braun T3 radio that will still broadcast the football results. By contrast, the iPod is designed to be obsolete and in the bin within six months to make way for the next world-shattering minimal revision (if the battery doesn’t fail before then). Steve takes his cue from high fashion. His products, like his staff, are treated as the coolest new thing today, but yesterday’s news tomorrow. Perhaps Steve thought Dieter’s philosophy of “less is more” meant less value, more profit?

In the UK, the iPod developed into a cool brand name to rival Aston Martin.[4] The prestige auto manufacturer partnered with Apple to allow the driver to dock his iPod to the roadster’s digital display. Aston Martin’s very British website reads:

Once docked with the cable connection, the iPod menus are replicated on the DBS's main display. The driver can use either the selector wheel or two steering wheel buttons to replace the iconic click wheel interface of the iPod, allowing one to safely navigate through the music on the iPod without the need to take your hands off the wheel.[5]

The convergence of Jonathan’s two favourite things was not just a business partnership, but a well-orchestrated example of cross pollination branding – two cool brands merging to spin a marketing synergy of ultra-cool.

The next move was to select the right celebrity association. Jonathan offered a special slick black iPod to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. However, Gordon was advised by his advisors that the iPod was too expensive to be accepted by a politician as a gift, and decided to purchase one out of his own pocket. The iPod was indeed overpriced. There was deluge of similar mp3 players on the market without the hefty "mystique mark-up" typically bundled with an Apple product.

[1] The Local (2010, February 17) Less but better: Design according to Dieter Rams. Retrieved from http://www.thelocal.de/society/20100217-25321.html

[2] Swiss Dots (Producer). (2009) Objectified [DVD].

[3] McGuirk, J. (2009, December 4) Braun and beauty: Dieter Rams comes to London's Design Museum. The Guardian.

[4] Sweney, M. (2007, September 13) Aston Martin tops cool brands list. The Guardian.

[5]astonmartin.com (2011) Retrieved from http://www.astonmartin.com/eng/thecars/db9/ipodintegration-2

iPod, therefore I am

Fortune Magazine: Can we expect Apple to move into related consumer electronics businesses?

Steve: If Apple can find things that are complementary to its core, that's great … I won't go into what other complementary things there might be, but when you look back in a year, it will all make sense.[1]

The world waited, not one, but three years for Steve’s next big Apple thing. He released it hot on the heels of a political and emotional maelstrom that even Steve didn’t see on the horizon.

Three days after 9/11, President George W. Bush grabbed a bullhorn and made history in front of workers at ground zero.

“I can’t hear you,” a worker yelled.

“I can hear you!” W responded. “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”[2]

Around the time of W’s call-to-arms, some guy was mailing envelopes of lethal white powder to reporters. Apple was also mailing mysterious invitations to journalists regarding a secret new gadget. Steve included a teaser, “Hint: It's not a Mac”. Chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, Steven Levy, would usually be the first to arrive at such events. However, he was so depressed about the atmosphere of terrorism, he decided to stay at home. Apple had a messenger drop a unit at his office instead. It was something called an iPod.

This nifty gadget succoured Steven, and millions of other happy customers, in the wake of 9/11. He wrote a book, The Perfect Thing as a homage to a device that healed more than a shrink could in a year’s worth of therapy:

I plugged in the iPod and the world filled up with the Byrds singing 'My Back Pages …The faces around me suddenly became characters in a movie centered around my own memories and emotions. A black-and-white moment of existence had sprung into Technicolor. I held my iPod a bit tighter. …I wasn't exactly forgetting about 9/11, but I was getting excited -- once more -- about technology and its power to transform our world. [3]

Steve was more than happy to sell his techno-placebo to a depressed market looking for a bright light:

I think that we're feeling good about coming out with this at a difficult time. Hopefully it will bring a little joy to people. It's a tough time, but life goes on. It must go on.

At first, it just played music. Five generations later, it included video playback so you could watch Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 on its QGVA display. If you paste your eyeball to its tiny 2.5-inch screen, you can just make out W’s self-satisfied grin as he tees off at the country club.

It took a few years on the market before the device devolved from an escape from terrorism to a terror magnet. An iPod was the alleged detonator in a foiled terrorist plan to blow up twelve passenger jets above five U.S cities.[4] The iPod was then specifically banned from flights leaving the U.K. "Eight hours without an iPod, that's the most inconvenient thing,” complained one young woman from Manchester.[5] A week later, the bomb squad and their dogs were all over a plane at Ottawa Airport after a young guy accidently dropped his iPod in the toilet. Disembarking passengers were questioned by armed police in a utility shed for several hours while “Operation iPod” ran its course.[6] By 2011, both W and 24 were no longer on television fighting terrorists. Rabid anti-terrorism had begun to look a tad silly by then. However, that didn’t stop Air Canada jettison a boy and his father from their flight before take-off. The airline decided to do a Jack Bauer after the child was spotted watching 9/11 footage on his iPod.[7]

When video was introduced to the gadget in 2005, it gave iPod sales a multi-million dollar spike, and gave Robert Semple of Credit Suisse a hard-on for Apple stock. The chief analyst for the multi-national financial services titan reported that the key to the iPod’s success wasn’t new customers but old customers constantly buying new versions. An interview with Forbes Magazine explained why:

…customers appear to be replacing their iPods with new models quicker; Semple estimates the current "lifecycle" of the iPod at approximately 1.5 years, down from two years. … [Semple stated] “it took Sony over 10 years to sell 50 million Walkmans, while Apple reached the same milestone in half the time despite lower market share and stiffer competition”.[8]

Steve had trained his customers well. They had become high-speed consumers, and were getter faster every year. They lined up to buy each new micro-revision introduced with biblically proportioned fanfare. Steve had nurtured a thriving garden of consumerism at its best (or its worst).

[1] Schlender, B. (1998, November 9) The Three Faces Of Steve. Fortune Magazine.

[2] Giulani, R. (2002, September 1) Getting It Right At Ground Zero. Time Magazine.

[3] Levy, S. (2007) The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[4] Laville, S. (2006, August 11) 'A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale'. The Guardian.

[5] Welch, D (2006, August 10) Mid-air terror bomb plot foiled. Sydney Morning Herald.

[6] Knight, A. (2006, August 18) Flying the paranoid skies. Ottawa Citizen.

[7] Peat, D. (2011, July 22) Man, son yanked off airliner. Toronto Sun.

[8] Kang, P. (2006, May 23) Apple Still In 'Early Stages' Of IPod Expansion. Forbes Magazine.