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Steve Jobs’s Chopsticks
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on the day Steve Jobs died; 10 years ago today on October 5th, 2011.
As I was about to graduate from Stanford business school in the spring of 1990, Steve Jobs invited me to visit him at NeXT, the company he had founded after being forced out of Apple a few years before. Showing me into his office, Steve, dressed in a black turtleneck and faded jeans, plopped into his desk chair, then motioned to a pile of chopsticks on his desk. He picked up a set, opening and closing the chopsticks as he spoke. “Aren’t these just beautiful? Look how clean and simple the lines are.”
He had just been in Japan, Steve explained, and at dinner one night he found himself using the best chopsticks he had ever tried. “They’re nothing but inexpensive wood, just like any other chopsticks,” he said. “But just look at them. Beautiful.I had them ship me a bunch. Here, have one.” He tossed me a set.
As we talked in his office, then drove down 101 to Palo Alto, where we had dinner together, Steve mentioned that he’d like me to consider becoming his chief of staff—I was only two years out of the Reagan White House, and Steve figured that someone who had worked for Reagan might meet his own standards—then told me about himself. Not about his life since he had become famous. About his early life. About what it had been like to grow up as an adopted kid.; About what it had been like to be raised by a repo man. “If somebody got behind in his car payments,” Steve, driving a sleek black Porsche, told me, “the bank would hire my father to get the car back. My father would tail the guy. When he pulled into a McDonalds, my father would pull in behind him. And when he got out to go in and get his hamburger, my father would jump into the car and steal it. What a way to make a living.” The sheer raw mercilessness of the market. Steve experienced it early. Yet he also spoke that evening about sheer beauty, describing the Santa Clara Valley before it became Silicon Valley. “Orchards—when I was a boy there were still orchards all around here. You should have seen it when they were flowering in the spring. Clouds of blossoms.”
I declined Steve’s offer—he made it clear that he wanted me to protect him from the demands of the NeXT executives, but his executives, with whom I spent a day, made it clear that they wanted me to get Steve to give them more of his time—but we remained in touch. Steve married a friend of mine from business school. Both of us sent our kids to the same nursery school. From time to time we would run into each other at parties or in Palo Alto. The last time I saw him, we were both at a Fourth of July block party in his neighborhood a few years ago. As neighborhood kids competed in the balloon toss and pie eating contests, Steve and I talked.
We discussed both politics (Steve defended Al Gore, who had joined the Apple board, predicting that Gore would win a Nobel Prize, which he did just months later) and business (Steve gave me his analysis of Disney, explaining why he considered Michael Eisner inadequate, detailing the inferiority of Disney’s animated motion pictures to Pixar’s, and lauding Disney’s theme parks, which he considered underrated as both artistic and commercial achievements. “The way to turn around Mexico?” Steve said.; “Let Disney run the country.”) When I mentioned that I had begun reading up on the Cold War, he described his friendship with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, who had helped to develop photographic techniques for U. S. intelligence.
“Hey, Steve!” a neighborhood kid said, interrupting. “My iPhone isn’t working.”
I expected Steve to brush the young man off. Instead he took the iPhone, then spent five minutes examining the device while talking to the kid about the problems he had been having with it. Steve finally figured out what was wrong. “You’re not going to like hearing this,” he said, “but it’s not an Apple problem. It’s a problem with AT&T.” Before returning the iPhone, Steve held it up to me, pointing out the metal bezel into which the glass cover or window was set. Then he described the technical challenge involved in manufacturing it.
Intensity, ambition, a profound understanding of markets, a broad and fascinating mind—even if (and I say nothing here I failed to tell him to his face) his politics never made any sense—and a determinaton to get it right so obsessive that he felt compelled to fix a teenager’s iPhone at a block party. You can almost see how Steve earned his place. You can almost grasp how he became as important as Edison or Carnegie or Stanford or Rockefeller or Ford.
Yet one characteristic distinguished Steve Jobs from the others. It’s the characteristic that led him to toss me the chopsticks that I’ve kept on my desk ever since.
Only Steve insisted on beauty.
Published in General
A shame that Steve never met Roger Scruton. They could talked for hours about beauty.
How did he conquer beard dandruff?
Thank you, Peter. This kind of personal story is such a special way to see into the man.
Whatever his problems or defects, this is what made Apple what it is today.
I posted on Facebook today the following:
I didn’t realize today was the 10 year anniversary of Jobs’ death. I likely wouldn’t have posted it if I had known. Jobs was a singular human, with problems and hang-ups and weaknesses the same as anyone else. But his insistence on getting right how a thing feels was truly remarkable.
I admire the fellow in many ways. Rather than ruin that with a “but,” I’ll start a new paragraph.
He was a canny aggregator. He understood the role of aesthetics in getting the nerdy wonky stuff to the masses. He was needlessly cruel to other people, but charismatic to the multitudes: the reality distortion field was not a myth.
The insistence on beauty was not always practical – the hockey-puck mouse of the first iMac was unusable, as was the skeuomorphic thumbwheel for a volume control on QuickTime. When he went all in on “realistic” designs, the interface was cluttered with fake leather stitching that supposedly imitated the furniture on his yacht. But you need only look at what Apple made after he was defenestrated, and look what they made when he returned. Post-Jobs: boring putty-hued boxes. After Jobs: a rounded machine that said both “appliance” and “object d’art,” with a style that seemed to summon the next century a few years ahead of schedule. The original iMac was so influential you could, in a year, buy a George Forman grill that had a dome of blue plastic.
The most lasting design decision was probably something he signed off on – Jony Ive’s 2007 iPhone 3G, an extension of 2001’s iPod aesthetic. It had a milky white hue, and the moment you saw it you thought “of course.” Like the iMac, it came from a cleaner, smarter future. A place dominated by a settled aesthetic. Rational, but still romantic; high-tech, but personal. It was the aesthetic that characterized the off-world humans in “Wall-E,” released the same year, and since then the white-and-blue hues have stood in for “The Future.”
By the way, the profile of the chopsticks is the profile of the MacBook Air, and I’ve no doubt he made the connection. A simple tool, tapering to a single point, elegant; in deft hands, it can manipulate anything.
Apple has always been lost without Jobs at the helm. Technical excellence is not enough on its own — for that, we have Sony. Perfect, tiny, ugly, and solving the wrong combination of problems.
Jobs had the vision and the drive. I predict that thirty years from now, most management stories will be “Steve Jobs” stories, the way that most quotes are “Winston Churchill” quotes.
Always been lost? Apple’s stock price and market cap have increased 6x since Jobs passed away and it is literally the most valuable company on the planet and the iPhone is the most successful consumer product in human history. If that’s “lost,” I’ll take it.
I don’t have much to add to the excellent comments. I agree with most of them. I’m surprised with the “repo man” disclosure, that’s not on Issacson”s biography, a lot is missing in the biography about his father and sister.
Their product is going down so I suspect that their stock price will go down. I know Steve Jobs was notoriously hard to work with but he ensured quality control. Now I can’t download anything off of steam.
I do not want the stuff they make. I am driving their stuff out of my ecosystem. They are becoming just another information stealing and dealing company, with some nice shiny bait.
Funny story. Y’all know I work in IT. I was having a conversation with one of my network admins, and we were talking about the iPhone boxes. This guy had one of those old Motorola Androids, for which I happened to have a few boxes lying around (I was in the process of selling company phones that were locked to Verizon, as we’d switched to AT&T). This guy said he didn’t know why Apple made the boxes the way they did. I said “Look at this box from Motorola. It inspires nothing. It’s just packaging.” Then I showed him an iPhone box. I said “This box tells you that whoever made the phone must really know what they are doing, because they paid such careful attention to detail on the box!” He said “It doesn’t tell me that, it just tells me they wasted money. For me this is just a tool, something to make calls on, that’s it.” To which I said “You have no understanding of the smartphone market. You don’t understand that to most folks their mobile device is more than a tool. It’s an extension of who they are, whether they know it or not.” Jobs and Ive knew that to be true. To a certain degree they made it true.
All that said, my Samsung Galaxy is better than any phone Apple has ever made. (see? I make my own point.)
The question I have is: are they riding on the success of Apple when Jobs and Ive were running the show? Did they reach a tipping point that gives them enough momentum they just keep going? When you are in the ecosystem, it is hard to get out. Sort of like being a liberal. But once you are out…man oh man does it feel good. ;-)
I use a $400 iPod and I have to admit that I find it very hard to imagine switching to anything else because of how nice it is. Maybe that would actually work with some type of MP3 player or cheap phone.
I use a sub $300 Samsung smart phone because I just don’t need that good of a phone. I tried Motorola, but the reception is not even close in one area I am forced to be in.
I hear that chrome books are very secure like a Mac as long as you don’t use the same email as you have on your android. I may try to get away from Mac laptops in someway.
I definitely remember reading this before. 10 years ago . . . I’ve been hanging around here way too long.
My iPhone 13 and my M1 MacBook Air disagree with you. So I’ll take that bet.
So you’re replacing your “information stealing and dealing” Apple devices with ones made by….Google? An advertising company with a search engine?
I think you can do that for a few years and a couple of product cycles, but not for 10 years. And the products are still strong (mostly – they have a few bombs now and then — but so does everyone). My M1 MacBook Air is the best laptop I have ever owned and I’ve own dozens and dozens of them. When the new Apple Silicon chips make it into their pro lines (likely starting later this month), I’ll be buying those too.
Supposedly in Europe you can get phones that are spy proof in this sense. You never hear anybody talking about it, though.
That’s a fair point. They make great hardware, no questions about that.
Years ago I had over hundred apps on my phone. I now have 15. Pretty close to the bone. I struggled and failed for a while to force Apple to stop publishing everything to “my” iCloud, which is private except for the fact that Apple gets to slurp it all up. I have that all turned off now, and if you believe them, that’s great. Maybe they’ve even stopped. It’s not as though the phone itself can be trusted.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this. https://grapheneos.org/features
Google is not an advertising company. Google is a surveillance company with several lines of effort.
Apple and Google, and a bunch of other companies are not your friends. They’re just the professional executioners, and preferable to the amateurs. Let’s make it a clean job.
Tim Cook is a soul-less partisan liar, and I miss Steve Jobs.
Allow me to introduce you to my beloved late 2008 MacBook Pro 15, in the first Unibody case. I recently gave it a coming of age present — new RAM, new battery, new SSD, Fresh OS install to the latest it will support.
I learned a lot about the difference between how Apple used to work and how they do now. I can’t even blame them for some of it — some is just good sense in a different world. My least favorite Apple characteristics are the anti-repair malfeatures built not only into hardware, but now into software; “If S/N of individual component changes; then refuse to boot.”
Customer: “I bought a computer and I’m going to replace a component.”
Apple: “No, you licensed our technology, and you’ll do no such thing.”
Apple is highly successful, and has become just another company. They ought to bring back the Pepsi guy. He’d fit right in now.
Spies tend not to talk.
I put it that way because I don’t know how to describe it technologically. It’s like a Linux computer or something. If that’s true we need them here.
Nothing is spy-proof. Everything is compromised, or relies upon other things that are compromised. The best anybody can do at this point is segregate. Different machines for different activities. Even so, if you do not manage your access points on a per connection basis, all this will accomplish is making it slightly more troublesome for the fascist surveillance state to connect all of the dots about you. It is of value, but limited value.
And of course, the moment you start behaving as if you see them, they see that, too. We self-identify as targets needing increased surveillance by presenting an imperfectly compiled set of dots. Man! Why oppress the people when they will do it for you?
We are well and truly Zucked.
I mean it’s like a low powered operating system that doesn’t let the normal spyware work on it. That’s all I’m saying. You could buy phones like that here a few years ago but they were really crappy. Maybe you still can.
To the US Government, US citizens might as well be the Chinese Taliban. The government protects its interests against the effects of our interests — against us. Americans insist upon our Constitutional rights, such as freedom from unlawful search and seizure, and freedom of association? Well, isn’t that just what a terrorist would say.
Steve Jobs had a political viewpoint, but he ruffled feathers from time to time when he would not use the Apple influence to promote partisan political causes. IIRC.
People like Steve Jobs helped keep places like Silicon Valley on the rails. Well he’s gone and we’re certainly not seeing any restraint on the part of SV. I suspect that if Jobs were alive and running Apple. they would be a better, more American company right now — a better corporate citizen of the Republic.
Can’t prove it.
Ah. Yep, not spy-proof, but some of the simple feature phones are worth a look. I was considering a Nokia 2720 V Flip (the V is for Verizon), and working to de-Google that. A predecessor phone attracted a project to de-Google that one — The project seems to have died, but in the remnants, the basics should get you root access and allow you to (if nothing else) make “un-deleteable” applications suddenly very deleteable. Won’t be able to “clean” the thing, but you can suppress most of its worst habits.
What do you mean? The games won’t run, or the app won’t let you download anything? Doesn’t sound like a quality control issue, but a matter of permissions, settings, etc.
My feeling about iCloud is that it’s worth the convenience of having my photos and other data easily accessible on all of my devices. Would I keep my medical or other sensitive data on there? No. But I wouldn’t keep that kind of stuff on any commercial cloud services.
But if Apple wants to look at my pictures of pretty sunsets, my cat, or my drone videos, they are welcome to knock themselves out. What I know they aren’t doing is selling advertising against my content and selling the data generated by that advertising to Lord knows who.
Have not, but I’ll take a look.
Speaking as someone who is currently fighting a multiple front war on podcast ad tracking (probably against our business interests), let me assure that advertising and surveillance are well on their way to becoming synonymous.
I don’t think they are my friends. They are businesses and my interactions with them are transactions. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that many of their products are excellent. Because they are. Full disclosure: Ricochet’s email, documents, and spreadsheets, shared calendars, and more are all run by Google. And we pay them for it.
Sorry, Steve Jobs was more partisan than Cook – he was a dyed in wool 60’s hippie and his politics never changed, as Peter references in this post. And I highly doubt that Jobs would have cultivated a relationship with Trump. Likely just the opposite.
You’ll have to tell me specifically about Cook’s lies, as I am not aware of them.