Headphone Jacks, MacBook Pros, and the Legacy of Steve Jobs
A lot’s been written about Apple’s recent product choices. This summer the iPhone 7 dropped the 3.5mm headphone jack, a standard that’s ubiquitous in audio, with Phil Schiller famously saying Apple did it because of “courage”. More recently, new MacBook Pros dropped much-beloved ports and made weight/power/battery tradeoffs that have frustrated power users. If you haven’t read it, my friend Chuq Von Rospach wrote a great piece earlier this week, which has garnered a lot of much-deserved attention.
“This wouldn’t have happened if Steve Jobs was still around,” has been the classic response of unhappy Apple observers. Well, this is probably exactly what Steve Jobs would have done — and he told us himself in 2010. He even said it took courage.
In 2010, Steve Jobs appeared at Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s “All Things Digital” conference (ATD later became Re/code, and was purchased by Vox Media in 2015). It was Steve’s last appearance at the conference, and is a wonderful 90 minutes that I’ve listened to repeatedly. It’s still available (free) via iTunes. It was the year Apple surpassed Microsoft in market value. The iPad had just been introduced and was selling beyond all expectations, and Apple and Adobe appeared to be having a little war about the lack of Flash on the iPad. Unsurprisingly, this dominated the first 15 minutes of the interview.
In his first response (about 4 min in), Steve described how Apple — going back to the Lisa and Mac Plus — had always chosen promising emerging technologies:
“…different pieces of technology kind of go in cycles. They have their springs and summers, and autumns, and then they, you know, go to the graveyard of technology. And, so we try to pick the things that are in their springs. And, if you choose wisely, you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything. And you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform”
From there, he went on to describe how Apple was the first to adopt the 3.5" floppy, then was the first to drop it with the iMac. How Apple was the first to adopt USB en masse, and abandoned serial and parallel ports. How they got rid of the optical drive on the Macbook Air.
Steve: “And sometimes when we get rid of things […] people call us crazy.”
Walt: “Or at least premature, maybe.”
Steve: “No, they call us crazy.”
At about the 11 minute mark, Walt asked Steve what he’d do if the market ultimately decided that the iPad was “crippled” without Flash. Jobs’ response is as applicable to Apple’s current product choices as it was to Flash on iPad in 2010:
Things are packages of emphasis. Some things are emphasized in a product; some things are not done as well in a product. Some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product. And so different people make different choices, and if the market tells us we’re making the wrong choices, we listen to the market. We’re just people running this company. We’re trying to make great products for people, and so, we have at least the courage of our convictions to say, “We don’t think this is part of what makes a great product. We’re gonna leave it out.” Some people are gonna not like that. They’re going to call us names. It’s not going to be in certain companies’ vested interest that we do that, but we’re gonna take the heat ’cause we want to make the best products in the world for customers. We’re gonna instead focus our energy on these technologies, which we think are in their ascendancy, and we think are gonna be the right technologies for customers, and, you know what, they’re paying us to make those choices. That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do — is to try to make the best products we can, and if we succeed, they’ll buy ’em. And if we don’t, they won’t. And it’ll all work itself out!
I don’t know if you can get any more direct than that, and I can’t help but think that those words — or ones very similar — were what helped push Apple designers and product developers to make the recent decisions that we’ve spent so much time second guessing.
This is the legacy of Steve Jobs. An Apple creating products that unapologetically embrace new technologies and jettison the old — even when we call them crazy for it. As much as it might frustrate those of us who rely on Apple for entrenched workflows, who have invested in Apple ecosystems (and dongles), who even expect Apple to adopt the ways of a market leader that protects their established customer base… that isn’t what Steve Jobs left, and it isn’t what Tim Cook has nurtured in the years since.
They’re still doing what they’ve always done.
If they succeed, we’ll buy ’em. If they don’t, we won’t.
And it’ll all work itself out.
Credit: Stewart Mader called out these same quotes in a post several years ago, and I used his transcription rather than type my own from scratch. Thanks, Stewart.
