Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.
He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.
There are counteless articles discussing fears that the iPad might mean the beginning of the end for the Mac. The near-universal “no” argument is that professionals will always need the power that Macs afford, versus iPads, which are primarily “content consumption devices.”
Exactly. Steve Jobs recently said that, “PCs [i.e. Macs] are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.”. Obviously, as anyone in the US knows, the amount of people who own trucks is much higher than the amount of people who actually need them, but if our culture were sane, one could probably approximate that 1% of people would own trucks. This sounds an awful lot like the 1% rule: the assumption that only 1% of people actually create anything.
This is why it would make no sense for Apple (and by “Apple” I mean Steve Jobs, because seriously, who else at that company makes any actual decisions?) to kill the Mac. The 1% will buy Macs, and create “content” to be “consumed” by the 99% with iPads and iPhones, as envisioned by Jobs. Obviously, with the introduction of iOS apps such as iMovie, there will be some ability for those without a “creation device” to do something creative. But the limitations of such apps, and, for that matter, touchscreen interfaces themselves, mean that only in a small variety of cases will one be able to produce anything of professional quality on an iDevice. If you want a degree of control that’s necessary for professional quality, you’ll need a general purpose computer, such as a Mac.
Perhaps, to some degree, it’s always been this way. Creating something to show on a television has to be done with all sorts of professional equipment. The fact that everyone, for so many years, has owned a device which could be used for endless creativity has been by accident. Only 1% of people have leveraged the creative capabilities of their computers. Steve Jobs simply aims to remove the complexity of computers for those who don’t wish to create anything.
So, why is this cynical? Is it because Steve Jobs desires monopolistic control over the lives of creators and consumers alike? Is it because Steve Jobs believes he can tell people what they want, and that they just have to lie down and accept it? No, it is because Steve Jobs is building creative professionals an ivory tower. He chooses to reinforce the idea that only 1% of people create anything, instead of asking, “why?”
The answer, of course, is that creating things is really, really difficult. Not actually being creative, though. Anyone can come up with a great idea. But the execution of these great ideas is, to 99% of people, extraordinarily difficult.
There’s a different Steve who is asking that question, “why?”. Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram is the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of plain-English calculator which can take, for example, the phrase “wind speed of Hurricane Katrina times stock price of Cisco” and actually give you a result. It’s interesting if not mind-blowing in its current form, but it’s only the beginning of Wolfram’s plans for the future. In an oddly downplayed remark near the 11:45 mark of a TED Conference talk, Wolfram describes how Wolfram|Alpha integrates with Mathematica, a complex computational programming language he created. Already, you can type “spiky” into Mathematica, and it will use Wolfram|Alpha to understand which complex shape you’re talking about.
But then, Wolfram speculates what might happen once this plain English technology gets even better: “It really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to just sort of say what they want in plain language, then…Wolfram|Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they’re asking for.”
That’s amazing in and of itself. Now replace “programming” with “computer-generated animation.”
Obviously, it’s going to be an extremely long time before I can give my artificial intelligence assistant a sci-fi movie script and have it render the whole thing in Avatar-level detail before my eyes. But at least Stephen Wolfram is working to bring us closer to a world like that. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to lower the barriers to creativity. He is taking the barrier between “amateur” and “professional” and electrifying it with 40,000 volts.
I Admire Steve Jobs the Way That Teddy Roosevelt Admired Elephants
Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.
He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.
There are counteless articles discussing fears that the iPad might mean the beginning of the end for the Mac. The near-universal “no” argument is that professionals will always need the power that Macs afford, versus iPads, which are primarily “content consumption devices.”
Exactly. Steve Jobs recently said that, “PCs [i.e. Macs] are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.”. Obviously, as anyone in the US knows, the amount of people who own trucks is much higher than the amount of people who actually need them, but if our culture were sane, one could probably approximate that 1% of people would own trucks. This sounds an awful lot like the 1% rule: the assumption that only 1% of people actually create anything.
This is why it would make no sense for Apple (and by “Apple” I mean Steve Jobs, because seriously, who else at that company makes any actual decisions?) to kill the Mac. The 1% will buy Macs, and create “content” to be “consumed” by the 99% with iPads and iPhones, as envisioned by Jobs. Obviously, with the introduction of iOS apps such as iMovie, there will be some ability for those without a “creation device” to do something creative. But the limitations of such apps, and, for that matter, touchscreen interfaces themselves, mean that only in a small variety of cases will one be able to produce anything of professional quality on an iDevice. If you want a degree of control that’s necessary for professional quality, you’ll need a general purpose computer, such as a Mac.
Perhaps, to some degree, it’s always been this way. Creating something to show on a television has to be done with all sorts of professional equipment. The fact that everyone, for so many years, has owned a device which could be used for endless creativity has been by accident. Only 1% of people have leveraged the creative capabilities of their computers. Steve Jobs simply aims to remove the complexity of computers for those who don’t wish to create anything.
So, why is this cynical? Is it because Steve Jobs desires monopolistic control over the lives of creators and consumers alike? Is it because Steve Jobs believes he can tell people what they want, and that they just have to lie down and accept it? No, it is because Steve Jobs is building creative professionals an ivory tower. He chooses to reinforce the idea that only 1% of people create anything, instead of asking, “why?”
The answer, of course, is that creating things is really, really difficult. Not actually being creative, though. Anyone can come up with a great idea. But the execution of these great ideas is, to 99% of people, extraordinarily difficult.
There’s a different Steve who is asking that question, “why?”. Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram is the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of plain-English calculator which can take, for example, the phrase “wind speed of Hurricane Katrina times stock price of Cisco” and actually give you a result. It’s interesting if not mind-blowing in its current form, but it’s only the beginning of Wolfram’s plans for the future. In an oddly downplayed remark near the 11:45 mark of a TED Conference talk, Wolfram describes how Wolfram|Alpha integrates with Mathematica, a complex computational programming language he created. Already, you can type “spiky” into Mathematica, and it will use Wolfram|Alpha to understand which complex shape you’re talking about.
But then, Wolfram speculates what might happen once this plain English technology gets even better: “It really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to just sort of say what they want in plain language, then…Wolfram|Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they’re asking for.”
That’s amazing in and of itself. Now replace “programming” with “computer-generated animation.”
Obviously, it’s going to be an extremely long time before I can give my artificial intelligence assistant a sci-fi movie script and have it render the whole thing in Avatar-level detail before my eyes. But at least Stephen Wolfram is working to bring us closer to a world like that. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to lower the barriers to creativity. He is taking the barrier between “amateur” and “professional” and electrifying it with 40,000 volts.