Actually, Steve Jobs Did Want Us to Use Our iPhones Like This (Premium)

A recent editorial about smartphone obsession is well-intended, but it gets the history of Steve Jobs and the iPhone all wrong.

Cal Newport is a computer scientist and author, according to the byline of his recent New York Times editorial, Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This. I’m a bit peeved that gets credit for ideas that others have long had---like my notion of “deep work,” which I independently added as a daily block to my calendar many years ago---but he has done a good job of marketing himself and his self-help advice.

With the popularity of Deep Work behind him, Newport has moved on to digital minimalism, a topic that is, perhaps not coincidentally, of great interest to me as well. (I’m not sure who’s stalking whom here, but we certainly seem to be on the same page most of the time.) Actually, I’m generally interested in minimalism as well---my desire to scan photos and destroy all the original paper copies is tied to this---but let’s just focus on the subject at hand for now.

“In 2007, Steve Jobs … introduced the world to the iPhone [and] if you watch the full speech, you’ll be surprised by how he imagined our relationship with this iconic invention, because this vision is so different from the way most of us use these devices now,” he explains. “The presentation confirms that Mr. Jobs envisioned a simpler and more constrained iPhone experience than the one we actually have over a decade later. For example, he doesn’t focus much on apps. When the iPhone was first introduced there was no App Store, and this was by design.”

You get the idea.

So, two things.

One, Newport’s description of the original iPhone introduction is accurate. Thanks to several insider books and even Steve Jobs’ official biography, we know that Mr. Jobs originally did not want his iPhone sullied by third-party apps.

Two, things changed … a lot. And what Mr. Newport is ignoring---because it runs counter to his notion that we’ve overdone it when it comes to smartphone usage---is that Steve Jobs didn’t just go along for that ride. He led the charge.

Yes, Jobs had to be convinced in 2007-2008 that putting an app store on the iPhone wasn’t just the right thing to do, but the obvious thing to do. But there are dozens of examples of this kind of thing with Steve Jobs, a man who everyone knows as “mercurial” specifically because of his ability to suddenly twist 180 degrees and head off, with gusto, in a completely different direction.

What Newport doesn’t describe, of course, are the many, many Jobs public appearances in which he boasted of the success of the App Store and his iPhone’s ability to run an ever-larger selection of apps in the years following that first device. Or the many, many times he boasted of the money that Apple handed over to third-party app developers. Or that Apple, thanks to the very success of this platform---not the iPhone as a standalone device, but ...

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