Steve Jobs: Objects of Our Life
Steve rarely attended design conferences. This was 1983, before the launch of the Mac, and still relatively early days of Apple. I find it breathtaking how profound his understanding was of the dramatic changes that were about to happen as the computer became broadly accessible. Of course, beyond just being prophetic, he was fundamental in defining products that would change our culture and our lives forever.
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In the talk, Steve predicts that by 1986 sales of the PC would exceed sales of cars, and that in the following ten years, people would be spending more time with a PC than in a car. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he sees as the inevitability that this would be a pervasive new category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He asks that they start to think about the design of these products, because designed well or designed poorly, they still would be made.
He was such a clear thinker and communicator.
It’s a fabulous time capsule of the pre-digital era, with Jobs saying “Uh-oh” when no one in the audience admits to owning an Apple or any other personal computer. This is a young Steve Jobs, speaking more extemporaneously and unguardedly than he would in later years. I encourage you to spend some time on the exhibit and, in particular, try to watch the full 55-minute presentation.
I was mostly struck by how prescient Jobs was in that talk. Although he had to explain computers and software by analogy for an utterly non-technical audience, he still tossed out prediction after prediction about how things would be in the future. Given that this is 1983, we’ve lived through much of that future by now, and with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that he was remarkably accurate, if sometimes optimistic regarding timeframes.
I’ve never seen a bad Steve Jobs video. So when a new one is put out there into the world, the bar is quite high. Surprising no one [it] does not disappoint.
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His talk really takes off though when he ends his prepared remarks almost comically abruptly with “so what do you want to talk about?” The crowd sort of laughs and then realizes he’s dead serious and breaks into applause. And then the questions start. I’ve written about Jobs’ ability to command a Q&A before, and it was clearly the mode in which he best operates. As someone who was in a few such sessions (mostly public, as a member of the press, but one memorable one which was private), it’s impossible to overstate how good he was at these. Everyone knows the famous/infamous “reality distortion field”, but it really undersells Jobs’ ability to command a room by speaking in a way that’s intensely human.
