Jobs’s ‘quirky Apple’

A few side notes to John Gruber’s piece The Things They Carried, about the Sept. 9 Apple event It’s Glowtime

I don’t read Daring Fireball as diligently as I used to do time ago. It has always been a Mac- and Apple-oriented blog, implying a natural built-in bias, but I always appreciated Gruber’s balance in most of his critiques and stances. And I always maintained that he was a big influence on me, and one of the main reasons I wanted to start a tech blog of my own all those years ago.

But in recent years I haven’t particularly liked Gruber’s more and more apparent bias towards Apple and the company’s politics and behaviour, something I attribute to him having more access to the company’s higher executives. And I’ve found his position towards the EU and the way EU legislation is affecting Apple operations to be misguided, disingenuous, and borderline offensive.

Unlike other people, and despite all this, I haven’t stopped reading Daring Fireball for now, partly out of curiosity, partly because, when it comes to technology insights and observations, Gruber can still provide some interesting food for thought.

And in fact, when I started reading his latest long-form article on Apple’s September 9 event It’s Glowtime, titled The Things They Carried, I was intrigued and interested in reading his take. But a few paragraphs in, my eyebrow started to raise:

Last week’s “It’s Glowtime” event was very strong for Apple. It might have been the single strongest iPhone event since the introduction of the iPhone X.

Wh… What? Have I watched a different event? Has Apple broadcast a shittier event for us viewers in the EU out of spite? The iPhone X — while I hated that it introduced the notch in the iPhone design — wasn’t exactly as iterative a product as the iPhone 16 (and the Watch, and the AirPods that have been presented along with it). I don’t see anything particularly groundbreaking to make me consider It’s Glowtime “the single strongest iPhone event since the introduction of the iPhone X.” This quote sounds like a blurb you’d find in one of Apple’s press releases.

But this is just a quibble. Later on, we encounter more… fascinating observations:

But the biggest difference is that Apple, under Jobs, was quirky, and I think would have remained noticeably more quirky than it has been under Cook. You’d be wrong, I say, to argue that Cook has drained the fun out of Apple. But I do think he’s eliminated quirkiness. Cook’s Apple takes too few risks. Jobs’s Apple took too many risks.

I agree only in part with this, and it’s a small part. I want to clarify some things about that ‘quirky’, but I have to add more context first.

Duds

After the debatable remark that “Jobs was driven to improve the way computers work. Cook is driven to improve the way humans live”, with which I simply disagree, Gruber makes an excursion to illustrate aspects of Apple’s quirkiness under Jobs, and talks about the third-generation iPod nano.

It’s quite possible you don’t remember the fat Nano, because it wasn’t insanely great, even though it replaced 2nd-gen iPod Nano models that were. And so a year later, with the 4th-gen Nanos, Apple went back to the tall-and-skinny design, as though the fat Nano had never happened.

That fat Nano was quirky. It was also, in hindsight, obviously a mistake. I’m quite sure that inside Apple there were designers and product people who thought it was a mistake before it shipped. Steve Jobs shipped it anyway, surely because his gut told him it was the right thing to try. Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t make mistakes like that. That’s ultimately why Cook’s Apple is more successful[.]

I don’t know where this singling out of the third-generation iPod nano comes from. First of all, each of the first five generations of the iPod nano was in production for just one year, whether it was successful or not, a mistake or not, a dud or not. Some specific nano generations might have been more successful than others, but Jobs was keen on keeping things fresh by trying new designs and not dwell too much on the older ones. But, importantly, he often tried new designs almost exclusively on consumer Apple products. Pro or premium products had a different treatment. This is a crucial point I’ll elaborate further on.

The third-generation iPod nano was the first to feature video capabilities — its ‘fat’ look was due to its bigger 320×240 display, made bigger and brighter to watch videos more comfortably (the second-generation iPod nano’s display was a mere 176×132 pixels). The fourth- and fifth-generation nanos did return to a taller shape, but they weren’t less quirky, since to watch videos (and browse music albums in Cover Flow view) you had to rotate the iPod in landscape orientation. At least in the fifth-generation nano this quirk was partly justified by the fact that it had a camera and you could capture video, and some argue that holding the iPod in landscape orientation was better ergonomically.

But the point is, the design of the iPod nano kept changing year after year, no matter what. Personal assessment: the 6th-generation nano was the most daring from a design standpoint, and I liked that it was ‘clippable’ like the iPod shuffle, but from a manufacturing standpoint, it suffered from having tiny, fragile buttons that tended to break after a few months of continued use, and the touch interface, while cool, was applied to a display too small for its own good. If there’s a dud among the iPod nanos, it’s probably this one more than the ‘fat’ nano. And this iPod stayed in production for two years.

The same can be said in the unfortunate case of the 3rd-generation iPod shuffle. It was absolutely minuscule, and that’s because it had almost no physical controls, which were relegated to the included earphones. Clearly a product made to amaze — I purchased one many many years later, in 2017, and I liked it more than I did when it first came out — but still, we may consider this another ‘true’ dud.

But then Gruber considers duds the iMac G4, the Power Mac G4 Cube, and the iSight camera. While I don’t disagree about the Cube (a product whose failure I still think has to be attributed to bad pricing and positioning — and perhaps even to being the right product at the wrong time — more than anything else), the iMac G4 and the iSight were more successful products. The iMac G4, in various display sizes and processor speeds, stayed in production from January 2002 to July 2004, and during that time — at least in my part of the world — I saw it everywhere: offices, graphic studios, shops, dental clinics, you name it. The iSight was produced between June 2003 and December 2006, it underwent three revisions, and again, as more and more people took to videoconferencing at the time, the more I was seeing iSight cameras propped on top of Cinema Displays or aluminium PowerBooks. It wasn’t a quirky dud.

Mistakes

Let’s get back to the last bit of the quoted part above. Gruber says: Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t make mistakes like that. That’s ultimately why Cook’s Apple is more successful .

Selective memory is amazing. Shall we talk about a few duds that happened under Tim Cook’s Apple? Like the 2013 ‘trash can’ Mac Pro? Like the impregnable 2014 Mac mini? Like the 2015 12-inch single-port retina MacBook? — A dud in itself containing yet another dud in the form of the infamous keyboard with butterfly mechanism, one of the biggest blunders in Apple’s history that took the company four years, four years to acknowledge and fix it. Shall we talk about the Touchbar? Or the gold Apple Watch Edition? Shall we talk about the slow but assured deterioration of Mac OS, the user interface and Apple software in general?

Success (as by-product of success)

Tim Cook’s Apple is more successful because Cook, on the one hand, has done what he did best in his previous position: he’s expanded Apple’s reach and scale of operations; and on the other he’s been extremely effective at taking advantage of a consolidated brand and reputation. A lot of people today purchase Apple products in part because they take for granted that it’s a reputable premium brand. They don’t (always) question whether each Apple product is demonstrably, indisputably better than the competition. You buy a Rolex watch first and foremost because it’s a Rolex; you don’t make a fuss or start carefully comparing it to other brands and evaluate which is the better manufactured, the most precise timepiece, etc. And even if other high-end watch brands make products just as good as a Rolex, you still choose Rolex. It’s the brand you ‘know’ best. (Not the greatest parallel, perhaps, given the different order of magnitude of money involved, but hopefully you get the idea).

And a lot of other people today purchase Apple products because they’re well entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem. They prioritise that convenience over other considerations — like the worsened UI across Mac OS and iOS, like the worsened software quality, like certain atrocious design decisions such as putting a notch in iPhones and, worse, on MacBooks.

And let’s don’t forget how a lot of Apple products today, from a sheer outer design standpoint, haven’t dramatically changed since they were first produced under Jobs. And where they have changed, the new design is an obvious remix of past tried-and-true designs we first saw under Jobs. Unibody MacBook Pros stayed the same between 2008 and 2015, and have changed very little since 2015. They’ve got thinner, then thicker; they’re available in other colours and not just silver, they’ve acquired a stupid fucking notch, but their form factor, their essence, is unchanged.

Same goes for the iMac: same essential design from 2007 to 2020(!), then Cook’s Apple — in a momentary lapse of quirkiness — decided to redesign it with the M1 iMac in 2021, and basically forgot about it apart from a mild refresh in 2023.

Same goes for the Mac mini. The Mac Studio can be seen either as a taller mini or a G4 Cube cut in half.

The Mac Pro had to be returned to its ‘tower of metal’ design after the fiasco of the 2013 model. (But I won’t waste any more of your time talking about how the Mac Pro today has actually become the quirkiest professional product ever made by Apple, again thanks to Cook’s ‘vision’ and ‘sage leadership’).

Quirkiness

But let’s get back to Steve Jobs’s ‘quirky Apple’.

From the picture Gruber is painting in his piece, Steve Jobs’s Apple was characterised by a continued series of highs and lows, a tidal ebb-and-flow tied to the whims of its impulsive leader. And I concede that Jobs had an impulsive side. But I want you to pay close attention to which products were always the testing ground for design ideas and solutions; which products featured the more fun and whimsical side of Jobs’s Apple — they were the products aimed at the consumer segment. Risks were taken, but they were calculated risks, given that consumer Apple products in Jobs’s era were more affordable than ‘Pro’ products. (To go back to the iPod nano, if the design chosen for a particular generation turned out to be unsuccessful, Apple wouldn’t have gone bankrupt for selling fewer nanos).

Under Jobs, consumer products and professional products were more clearly separated; not just in price, but also (and more importantly for the sake of this argument) visually, in their design and their building materials.

The iMac was the most colourful, and it underwent four major design changes in nine years. Consumer product.

The iBook started colourful and with a polycarbonate shell. Then it went white, glossy and matte, and still polycarbonate, as opposed to the professional PowerBooks made of titanium and aluminium. Its design, too, changed a couple of times, to make it sleeker. Consumer product, and very successful among students.

The polycarbonate MacBook inherited the positioning and materials of the iBook. Same target segment. Here the outer design remained rather consistent, but still, its looks, materials, and manufacturing, clearly indicated ‘consumer product’.

The whole iPod line was obviously targeted at consumers, and here we find all kinds of shapes, colours, designs.

But if we look at all the professional and higher-tier Apple products under Jobs’s tenure, there isn’t much quirk, fun, or whimsy to be found:

The PowerBook G3 series was comprised of dark, austere notebooks, clearly aimed at professionals and businesspeople. And while there was an evolution in their design, becoming sleeker and more elegant machines, their form factor was essentially the same throughout their lifetime.

Then came the Titanium PowerBook G4 in 2001, and despite its issues with the finish that deteriorated over time, it was a successful product that went through four iterations, essentially unchanged, between January 2001 and September 2003.

Then came the Aluminium PowerBook G4 line. Same story: sleek design, different sizes but absolutely the same design language, which was kept unchanged between January 2003 and April 2006. Then, when it turned into the MacBook Pro in 2006 after the switch to Intel processors — guess what — the design still didn’t change except for accommodating the built-in webcam at the top of the screen, and it stays unchanged until the first unibody MacBook Pro in 2008. No quirkiness here either.

On the desktop side, we initially have the translucent Power Mac G3 ‘Blue & White’, fun and colourful, but somewhat positioned in a ‘semi-pro’ tier. It was also a short-lived machine, lasting about half of 1999. The Power Mac G4, instead, featured essentially the same design language throughout its entire lifetime, from August 1999 to June 2004.

The same can be said for the Power Mac G5. Identical design from its first introduction in 2003, to mid-2006, to then become the Mac Pro and retain the same design until 2012. No quirkiness on this front either.

Professional Apple displays’ design evolved together with the computer they were meant to be paired with. So at first they had a similar design as the Power Mac G3 ‘Blue & White’, then they were changed to fit the design language of the Power Mac G4 and the Cube, and finally they became more minimal and austere to be paired with the Power Mac G5/Mac Pro and the aluminium PowerBooks/MacBook Pros, and then to be the natural counterpart of the ‘unibody’ design of the later MacBook Pros. Again, products for professionals, no quirkiness or strange design alterations.

Jobs knew exactly where and how to direct the most fun and whimsical designs in Apple’s product lines. And fun and whimsical they were. And they were a joy to own and use, also thanks to their well-designed operating systems.

Homogeneity > fun?

Gruber says:

You’d be wrong, I say, to argue that Cook has drained the fun out of Apple. But I do think he’s eliminated quirkiness. […]

The delight is still there, but there’s less amazement. It’s by design. They’re not trying but failing to reach the heights of the Jobs era’s ecstatic design novelty, because those peaks had accompanying valleys. Apple today is aiming for, and achieving, utterly consistent excellence. Quirkiness no longer fits.

If arguing that Cook has indeed drained the fun out of Apple is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. One thing that I feel has been noticeably reduced is the ‘something special’ factor I once found in Apple products with much more frequency. It’s more than just the amazement. It’s that urge to get that Apple computer or device because it feels special. I’ve rarely been an early adopter of Apple products, but that was mostly due to budget. But after many keynotes, after many product announcements, I always thought, I can’t wait to get my hands on this. Believe it or not, the only products out of Cook’s Apple that have brought back that kind of feeling have been… the sixth-generation iPad mini and, briefly, the M1 MacBook Air.

The ‘utterly consistent’ excellence of Cook’s Apple is achieved through masterful levels of iteration. We’re seeing, for the most part, the same computers, devices, peripherals we’ve been seeing since they were introduced under Jobs, but continually refined and perfected. The brand and related recognition must be maintained. And before you jump at me and tell me that iteration in tech isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I’ll tell you that you’re right, it’s not. But when it patently goes on for this long and for every product line, I’m starting to question Apple’s ability to come up with something truly original and groundbreaking (and sorry, but the goggles are not that — they are stereoscopic iPads with iPadOS floating in 3D).

In eliminating quirkiness (not completely though, see the examples I made earlier), Cook has also eliminated that once clear distinction between entry-level Apple products and products aimed at professionals. There isn’t a ‘just MacBook’ anymore. The MacBook Pro / MacBook Air lines have different names, but now the design language and form factor are almost indistinguishable (even more indistinguishable than they were under Jobs, yes). There isn’t a truly compact Apple laptop anymore, now MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models are all crowding the space between 13-inch and 16-inch sizes. You want a compact laptop, get an iPad, seems to be Apple’s answer. I think there is still a market for a sub-$999 11- or 12-inch Apple laptop, maybe made of more rugged and ‘youth-proof’ materials. I don’t think it would be too much of a risk given current Apple profits and resources. But it would probably contaminate what Cook considers the Ideal Apple Brand. Ferrari doesn’t produce economy cars under their brand, are you crazy?

You bloody Roy, you

Gruber also misses the mark when he talks about Cook being passionate and giving as example that infamous 2014 shareholders meeting and Cook’s angry “I don’t consider the bloody ROI” retort, but instead of doing the nitpicking myself, I’ll link to Michael Tsai’s observations, with which I agree.

Conclusion

I have made a lot of digressions and excursions, and perhaps that has diluted the point I was trying to make. So I’ll try to summarise it in my conclusion. The main thing I didn’t appreciate in Gruber’s piece was the narrative about Steve Jobs’s Apple being quirky, impulsive, very risk-taking, versus Tim Cook’s Apple with Cook apparently saving the brand by removing quirkiness and uncertainty, and bringing Apple on a spotless path of constant excellence and success, free of mistakes and quirks. I hope to have demonstrated how Jobs actually and purposefully chose where to play the quirky/fun/whimsical card and where to play safe, design-wise.

And while I don’t deny Cook’s ability to make Apple an even more successful company, I would like to remind you of the state Apple was in when Jobs returned at the helm in 1997 versus the state Apple was in when Cook took control in 2011. In 14 years, Jobs literally built a company worth billions of dollars from the ashes of 1997 Apple. Cook has been an excellent asset manager, an excellent brand cultivator. He consolidated what was already successful and made everything greater and on an even bigger scale. And that’s undeniable. But he hasn’t built all this from scratch. He came into a very good inheritance. So while Gruber says,

I can’t prove any of this, of course, but my gut says that a Steve-Jobs–led Apple today would be noticeably less financially successful and industry-dominating than the actual Tim-Cook–led Apple has been.

my gut isn’t so sure about that. And I wouldn’t be this quick in selling Jobs short. If we’re talking about gut feelings, I’d say that if Steve Jobs were still around, we would have a differently successful and a differently industry-leading Apple. A company that wouldn’t feel so ‘corporate tech’ as other giants in the field. A company that probably wouldn’t be this greedily pushy when it comes to the App Store and its bloody 30% cut. A company that probably wouldn’t want to be involved in everything, everywhere, all the time in all the markets but would instead choose specific markets and bloody excel at those. A company that would probably know what to do with the iPad. A company that would still make excellent software — especially when it comes to the Mac. And that would be capable of differentiating itself in more meaningful ways than just being a giant tech powerhouse.

Gruber:

Jobs was driven to improve the way computers work. Cook is driven to improve the way humans live.

Steve Jobs:

It’s not just a job, it’s a journey. Let’s never forget that. … Your customers dream of a happier and better life. Don’t move products. Instead, enrich lives.