After listening to the most recent episode of The Talk Show, I decided to go hunt down video of Steve Jobs dropping the “i” from his title, and becoming Apple’s full-time CEO. That took place at Macworld Expo in January 2000.
This keynote is wild,1 as it includes the first public demonstration of Aqua, but something right before the CEO announcement caught my attention. In this clip, Jobs talks about how Apple viewed itself, and why some who called for it to be broken up into a separate software and hardware company were wrong:
This conversation is really interesting in the light of our current era. Apple’s model of making the whole widget has obviously paid off in a massive way in the 19 years since this keynote. Even companies like Microsoft and Google are toying with the model more and more through products like the Surface line of computers and Pixel-branded phones. And while there are calls for big tech companies to be broken up, Apple’s under scrutiny for the App Store, not its hardware business.
- I mean, just look at some of the press releases from that month. ↩