TO THE DETRIMENT OF DESIGN, THERE WAS ONLY ONE STEVE JOBS

The IPhone screen, with its idiot-proof icons,
builds on the long evolution of Apple's
graphic user interface.

For close to a decade now, every time I’ve had to use yet another badly-designed appliance, or had to sit idling at yet another ineptly-timed traffic light, or had to decipher yet another garbled set of instructions, I’ve thought of one man: Steven Jobs. And I wish he was still with us, or barring that, that at least there could’ve been a hundred more like him.

There’s no doubt that, with Jobs’s passing, the world lost one of the most important visionaries of the last hundred years. But for me, the loss has less to do with his putting a computer for the rest of us on a million desktops, nor with his uncanny knack for creating things that people didn’t even know they needed. Granted, these accomplishments are vastly important to Jobs’s legacy. But to my mind, his ultimate triumph was his singular skill at persuading a largely indifferent public that excellent design really matters. He wanted us all to be as passionate about beauty and simplicity as he himself was. And to the extent that Apple’s famously intuitive and user-friendly products are now more popular than ever, he seems finally to have succeeded.

A young Jobs poses with the original Macintosh,
circa 1984.

The fact is that the average American consumer has been amazingly tolerant of third-rate product design. Consequently—and understandably—any company that knows it can make perfectly good money selling clumsy, overcomplicated, or unintuitive products has no incentive whatever to improve them. And so most don’t. 

Apple's logo circa the 1980s.

In Jobs, however, we had the unique case of a businessman on a near-religious crusade to educate his own market, relentlessly challenging us to demand more than the run-of-the-mill crap we’re typically offered. 

It’s interesting to note that the Apple cofounder, despite being a pioneer in one of the most technically complex fields yet known to man, was not an engineer but rather a laid-back college dropout with a mystical streak. To add yet another layer of paradox to this singular mind, he was notoriously—some would say tyrannically—demanding of the people who worked for him. But if this is what it took to engender the phenomenally beautiful and beautifully functional objects Apple has created out over the years, then it was all worth it.

The iPhone 11: Would Jobs have approved? Hmm....

As you’ve probably guessed, I write on a Macintosh, and have done since I bought the very first model through an Apple engineer pal back in 1984. So yes, kids—I’ve been a true believer since long before the iPod, iPad, or iPhone even existed. In fact, I was a believer back when Steve Jobs still had a full head of hair. And for many of those years, I tried in vain to convince doubters why there was nothing like using a Mac—in short, why good design really mattered. Thankfully, with the wild success of those assorted i-Things, Jobs was finally able to make that case beyond any doubt. 

Whether Apple has been able to maintain its "insanely great" design in the near ten-year absence of Steve Jobs is debatable, as one look at the plug-ugly iPhone 11 makes clear. It's almost certain that, with all due acknowledgment of its technical brilliance,  Jobs would not have tolerated the inelegance of its design. 

Jobs had already revolutionized the fields of computing, film, music, and telephonics. I wish he’d been given the time for even more far-flung conquests. The world could have used a hundred more like him, but alas, there was only one.