A handful of feature-length tech tales have hit the presses (and pixels) this week, just as I hit the halfway mark of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, which I'd finally gotten around to picking up at my local independent bookseller. Coincidence? Perhaps—though I can't help but wonder if the savvy folks at Simon & Schuster saw fit to publish the new-book-table-worthy paperback edition about halfway between the wide release of Jobs and the publication of Fred Vogelstein's forthcoming Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. I've been slogging through a backlog of long-ish reads for as long as I can remember, but I knew I had to read the excerpt in the New York Times Magazine—a well-researched chronicle of very first iPhone—as soon as I stumbled across it on the forums the other day.
The story touches on many of the challenges and milestones of product design, as well as some that were unique to the iPhone, a foray into uncharted territory both for the wizards in Cupertino and as an entirely new product category. "...it wasn't at all clear to Apple's executive team that the features they enabled, like on-screen keyboards and 'tap to zoom,' were enhancements that consumers wanted."
Of course, the longstanding rivalry between designers and engineers comes up; forumite Mrog's favorite part is a quote from Phil Kearney: "Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, 'Why can't we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?' And you have to explain to them why you just can't." (Guess which side Kearney was on?)
Vogelstein's article is chock full of similar gems—I personally found the level of secrecy to be quite remarkable—and well worth the read. Also interesting: at one point, hardware exec Jon Rubenstein uses the idiom "put all your wood behind one arrow," which I had never heard before. A thread on Stackexchange includes some interesting trivia on the turn of phrase, noting that it was often used by deposed Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy... who, of course, crossed paths with Jobs and Apple many times over the years. Quoted in a Fortune article (following his ouster) in 2010, McNealy said: "Jobs has been brilliant, and he also understands the power of the secret better than anyone I have ever seen"... which is the very premise of the public's abiding obsession with his life and times.
Read "And Then Steve Said, 'Let There Be an iPhone'," then watch the Macworld event below. Then do something—anything—on your iPhone and marvel at what just happened...
...then hit the jump and keep reading (about recommended reading, as it were).Next up is an excerpt from another new book about how an artsy free-thinking software engineer transformed himself into an egotistic mogul worth billions. Sure, Vogelstein's piece is peppered with bits of Jobs' overbearing, often abrasive personality... but of course he isn't the subject of the cover story of this weekend's edition of the Times Magazine. Steve's social media scion is none other than Jack Dorsey, whose artful ascent is deconstructed in Nick Bilton's also-forthcoming (and also-hyperbolically-subtitled) Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. (It's slated for November 5th release, exactly a week before Vogelstein's page-turner, and it happens to be outperforming Dogfight in Amazon pre-sales.)
The heretofore untold history of the seminal microblogging service is certainly timely with its IPO on the horizon; all else equal, I found "All's Fair in Love and Twitter" to be as readable and insider-y as any Apple-related morsel. Bilton issues a caveat about the "creation myth" from the outset, acknowledging the much-publicized and dramatized precedents of Apple and Facebook as he relates Dorsey's rags-to-riches rise to Silicon Valley darlinghood.
Long story short—actually, the excerpt is a long story short, so just read it if you're so inclined.
Meanwhile, another startup is making headlines this week—not by emulating Jobs' polarizing persona but by extending his product philosophy to another category (give it a few years and maybe there will be a sordid exposé about the internal strife from the salad days of the company). We've had our eye on Nest since day one, and forum mod rkuchinsky caught wind of their latest product, the Nest Protect smoke detector. Wired's behind-the-scenes look at their new appliance provides an interesting counterpoint to the saga of the iPhone, not least because Nest founder Tony Fadell cut his teeth at Apple. Steven Levy parenthetically introduces him as the "lead inventor of the iPod"—he's billed as a "key executive on the [iPhone] project" in Vogelstein's article—but does well to explain the actual design process largely without reference to Fadell's former employer.
Even so, one line struck me as a subtle bit of commentary: "The algorithms created by Nest's machine-learning experts—and the troves of data generated by those algorithms—are just as important as the sleek materials carefully selected by its industrial designers." I doubt that Levy made an overtly polemical decision to differentiate the UX/HCI/tech/whatever-you-want-to-call-'em folks from the hardware designers, but the wording makes a fairly clear distinction between the two disciplines even as the T-shaped debate continues. I'll refrain from further speculation, but it's quite clear that Nest, like Apple, is committed to deeply integrating hardware and software.
Lastly, as further proof that Apple's legacy was/is in the ether (by which I mean Internet) this week, a recent discussion on "Modern Technology That Is Not Ready for the Market Yet" skirts around the topic on a broader level. OP 6ix launched the thread with complaints about his Apple TV of all things, but the discussion quickly shifts to a discussion of cloud/wi-fi-based services—namely, Adobe Creative Cloud—and eventually covers everything from Sim City 5 to tangentially-related American Girl dolls.
A remark about the Nest Protect resonates here: "A smoke detector is an appliance I never want to see, but always know that it's there working. The suggestion of making it much much smaller seems like a better direction than what they chose here... it seems like there is a missed opportunity here. Small, invisible, verifiable." NURBS's assertion is true of wi-fi in general; we've become so used to constant connectivity that we only miss it when it's gone. In the immortal words of Louis C.K., "It's going to space, could you give it a second to get back from space?" His famous and ever-relevant NSFW bit (which turns up apropos the "Not Ready" discussion) is something like a Steve Jobs rant turned on its head, from an end user: "We have this beautiful thing and we hate it."
And in response to Louie's subsequent observation that "I never saw a person going, 'Look at what my phone can do!'"—that's pretty much what the 2007 Apple announcement was, right? (And here, for good measure, is his anti-Twitter tirade.)
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Observant, thoughtful, and enjoyable (esp. Louis CK) post. Thanks!
Paul Simon's Boy in the Bubble lyrics previewed it: "These are the days of miracle and wonder."
And here we travel, looking, looking, breathlessly.