Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

I was somewhat shocked by the reactions to the tragic event, both from the media and from ordinary people. I heard a great deal of inaccuracies, as is typical in the media. In some broadcasts, it seemed as if Jobs had invented the mouse, windows, and icon interface, which in fact had been adopted thanks to an agreement with Xerox, which had first developed it. In others, it almost seemed as if he had invented the internet.

Some articles, like the one in Wired Italia, portray Jobs as an immense computer genius. The BBC wanted to delve even deeper by subjecting the brain of Alex Brooks, an infatuated Apple fan, to various neurological tests during the documentary Secrets of the Superbrands to verify his reactions to some of the Cupertino company's devices. The surprise, at least for neuroscientists, was to find neural reactions similar to those of mystical experiences or responses similar to those that religious believers experience when seeing sacred objects (“Simply viewing Apple kit provokes religious euphoria” in The Register).

Now, Jobs wasn't a computer genius. At the beginning of it all, when he was preparing to found Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, he was even teased a bit for not being a hacker. The technical genius was Wozniak. He was the one who designed the Apple I and freely distributed the project in the purest hacker spirit.

Jobs, if anything, was a marketing genius. He had demonstrated this immediately, when Woz, based on the design of John Draper (aka Captain Crunch), had built a blue box, a machine that allowed you to make free phone calls from payphones, sending the signal to the control center that informed you that the user had inserted a coin. Jobs had managed to sell quite a few of them to his schoolmates and their friends. It is symptomatic that, thanks to the blue box, Jobs had revealed his qualities, while Draper ended up in jail.

Jobs's genius lay in devising simple and intuitive ways to interact with technology, a user interface that even ordinary people could understand. And he was able to do this precisely because he wasn't a hacker. A hacker doesn't need these facilities, he doesn't even think about them. Instead, Jobs did think about them and had the courage to ask for them and bet that they would be successful despite the costs involved. Apple, in fact, has always created niche products, extremely expensive compared to the competition, but also extremely beautiful and easy to use, even at the cost of limiting their functionality.

The single button on the Apple mouse, for example, is a complete lunacy. When I work with the Conservatory's Mac, I unplug it and plug in a regular two-button mouse because the second button brings up the contextual menu on the Mac, the same one that appears when you Ctrl-click with both hands on the original mouse.
For example, I remember a Mac commercial that said, "Apple taught man to Macintosh: man has 10 fingers, but only uses one."
The interesting thing is that this mouse, which limits me, costs €50 with the wire or €65 for the wireless version.

Now, another of Jobs' qualities was convincing people they needed things they didn't really need and imposing these features as cornerstones that everyone then goes and copies. Marketing. Sure, some of them really are. Apple products are undeniably more beautiful (aesthetically) and easier to use than the competition.

But Apple is also a corporation, and it's one of the most closed and church-like corporations in existence. You can't make Mac clones. Although reverse engineering is commonly accepted in the IT world, Apple has always implemented systems to prevent imitations of its products, even at the expense of user convenience (the ROM operating system of the first Macs is an example).

With more recent products, Apple's closure has also extended to software. To create apps for iPhone and iPad, for example, you have to identify yourself, and Apple has the right to block their distribution on its stores and prevent them from running on those systems. And the blocked applications aren't just those with illegal or offensive features. We've already covered that. See here, here or here.

There's also a more disturbing and uncomfortable side to Apple, namely the fact that it's one of the main customers of the infamous Foxconn, the Taiwanese company known for its high suicide rate among its workers, apparently due to appalling working conditions. Foxconn manufactures iPods, iPhones, and iPads, as well as products from other companies, such as the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360, Amazon Kindle, and Sony Bravia LCD televisions. What's striking, however, is the contrast between Apple's typical libertarian marketing image and these production methods.

Rereading everything, I feel like I've only listed the negative aspects. Indeed, as I've already mentioned, I've heard a few too many exaggerations these days. However, I like to remember his last words to Stanford graduates: stay hungry, stay foolish.
I'll just point out that they aren't his. As he himself says:

When I was a kid, there was an incredible magazine called The Whole Earth Catalog, practically one of the bibles of my generation. (") On the last page of the final issue was a photograph of an early-morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were adventurous enough. Below the photo were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message.

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