NYT on Apple's Digital Way of Life

sinalet writes "The New York Times is running an article on Apple's 'digital way of life'. Most interestingly are some comments about the history of the iPod and its developers. 'Apple says it developed the iPod in just six months, faster than any major product in the company's history. The hand-held device, which contains more computing power than an early Macintosh, was put together starting in 2001 by hardware designers led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service.'"

Comments

WTF?

[Elwood P Dowd]

With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.

Say what? Did anyone else think that came out of left field? And Pattern Recognition is contemporary fiction. Not even sci fi, let alone cyberpunk. Say Jobs was born with "a technological queer eye" and you'd be making ten times more sense.

Glad to know John Markoff still can't write his way out of a paper bag. Some of the research in this article is interesting, but... that's assuming that it's the truth.

Jobs and the Zen Computers Thing

[thatguywhoiam]

There was one passage that struck me in the NYT article, a quote from this guy:

The success of the iPod doesn't seem to have significantly changed Apple's market share," said T. Michael Nevens, a director at both Borland Software and Broadvision and the former director of McKinsey & Company's technology consulting practice. And Mr. Nevens said that there was "no support for the theory" that the new digital appliances would bolster computer sales.

T. Michael Nevens is completely missing the point, I think.

I am reminded of an earlier interview with Jobs - I don't have the link, I believe it was maybe a Time article around the launch of the flatpanel iMac - and the interviewer kicked off the story with a description of his arrival. He came into the room that Jobs was in, sitting on the floor yoga-style, with a powerbook, and he was going through fonts. He sat there for 10 minutes looking at these various fonts, not speaking to the reporter. Then he looked up and said something like, 'Aren't these just beautiful? I love the fonts we licensed for OS X.'

This is a funny insight into Steve Jobs. I think he's just really bent on the idea of these seamless computers. When you really think about it, that real plug-and-play sort of mentality has always dominated the Mac experience. I think Jobs, Zen Weirdo that he is, fucking hates the whole Windows scene because to him it is just really really tacky. Too many options that are crap, none of it consistent, none of it forming something totally coherent from top to bottom.

So when T. Michael Nevens, or Random Slashdot Angrybot, says something about iPods not selling more Macs or affecting Mac sales, or not inreasing market share which clearly they have, just not appreciably in Macs, they are missing the context. Jobs' whole Seamless Vision Thing flows down from his input into the designs. The reason that iPods talk to iTunes so well, which talks to iPhoto and iDVD and all the other iCrap is because he just insists that it should work that way.

Then Rob Glasner talks about opening the iPod up to Rhapsody users, of course Jobs balks because he already has made the concession to market forces in selling the iPod for Windows at all. That is his mea culpa for keeping the original Macintosh project clamped down.

If Jobs had his way all of these little projects would make money - but if some of them have to act as bridges, or enabling mechanisms - the physical stores, the iTMS - then they will do so. The fact that all of the software and hardware work perfectly together is just the way Jobs wants it to work.