A post about Steve Jobs, Apple's coming-of-age story, and the life and times of Keynote
On January 9, 2007, in the crisp winter air, on the stage of the Mascone Convention Center in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the first iPhone in a spectacular speech. From the McIntosh of 1984 to the smartphone of today, a new era began.
The first iPhone launch in 2007
The Origin of Silicon Valley
In the fall of 1970, in front of an unassuming garage in the Santa Clara Valley, two young men met after being introduced to each other by a friend: a young Steve Jobs and Wozniak. Both were passionate about electronics and loved Bob Dylan and pranks. They met and talked at once, and soon became close friends. A year later, Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly specialty newspaper Electronic News, began a series of reports calling the 40-mile stretch of Santa Clara Valley "Silicon Valley USA.
Silicon Valley in the 1950s was a concentration of the American defense industry, which later gave birth to famous technology companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Intel. Jobs' father, Paul Jobs, once took Jobs to the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, which was located not far from his home. It was here that Jobs first saw a computer terminal and was fascinated.
Paul Jobs is a retired military man who works in the business of refurbishing used cars, and he is very confident in his craft and takes every detail seriously. It was from his father that Jobs inherited his fanatical attention to detail. And like Jobs, Woz learned a lot from his father. But the difference is that, in contrast to Paul Jobs' car-repair chores, Woz's father, Francis Wozniak, was a Caltech senior who revered engineering and worked at Lockheed designing missile guidance systems. Woz practically grew up in a pile of electronic components, which made him grow up to be an extremely good engineer and also contributed to his simple, honest, unsociable, and unambitious personality. Watts would spend a lot of time reading his father's electronics journals and fiddling with transistors and other electronic devices. By the time he was in eighth grade, he had learned how to build a computer based on binary. Jobs, meanwhile, had less extensive and systematic knowledge of electronics, but learned to discern product values and bargaining skills while following his father's car parts purchases.
In their younger days, they also enjoyed pulling pranks. Towards the end of the first iPhone launch, Jobs noticed that the page-turning pen in his hand had suddenly failed to work. In front of a packed audience, the fifty-something-year-old paused his speech to recall a prank he and Woz had pulled back then.
"Woz and I built a device, mostly Woz to do it, that would jam the TV signal. Star Trek was all the rage at the time. Woz would go into a public space by the TV, turn on his device in his pocket, and then the screen would start to blossom, so someone went to fix it. Just as he stood up, Watts turned the device off; as soon as he sat down, Watts turned it back on. Within five minutes, someone had to be standing on their hands and knees like I am now."
At the launch of the first iPhone, Steve Jobs recalls a prank with Woz
A prank
Woz's electronics skills, Jobs's business skills, and the two men's love of pranks ...... many factors mixed together to produce a crazy product that also laid the foundation for what would become Apple. In 1971, Woz, who was in college at Berkeley, and Jobs, who was nearing the end of high school, read an article describing how to emulate specific audio from AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) network lines to enable free long-distance calls. The two immediately decided to try their hand at it. After overcoming many technical difficulties, the Blue Box was born. "It's the most proud circuit I've ever designed," Watts later said, "and I still find it incredible to this day."
In the earliest days of the Blue Box, the Blue Box was only used to pull pranks. One of the more famous ones was when they had called the Vatican and Watts pretended he was Henry Kissinger and wanted to speak to the Pope. The other side was cautious, though, and turned him down. By the time the novelty of having fun had worn off, an event of great importance occurred: Jobs decided that the Blue Box was good enough that it should no longer remain in the amateur stage, but should be made and sold in bulk. He pooled the power supply, box, keyboard and other components together and came up with the pricing. This eventually established a partnership between the two: Wozniak made the product, Jobs suggested changes and was responsible for pricing and selling it. All the parts were worth $40, and Jobs decided to sell them for $150.
They knocked on doors in dormitories, looking for buyers and demonstrating on the spot. "We made about 100 Blue Boxes," Jobs recalled, "and almost all of them sold." The success of the Blue Box paved the way for their future collaboration. "If it wasn't for the Blue Box, there wouldn't be an Apple, I'm 100 percent sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put some inventions into production."
♪ Apple is born
Time came in 1976. Woz completes his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and joins Hewlett-Packard. Meanwhile, Jobs had become a total hippie. He took a break from Reed College, lived in a basement, didn't wear shoes, pushed for a starch-free vegetarian diet, and even practiced to find zen in India, and the two remained close friends. Jobs admired the fact that Woz was designing a personal computer that worked with a keyboard and a television, very different from those of the time (such as the Altair 8800, which used front-facing toggle switches and indicators for output) and much more user-friendly. He convinced Woz to start a company together to put this computer up for sale. A few days later, Apple Computer was born.
Some say the word 'Apple' is a tribute to Alan Mathison Turing (the father of computer science who was persecuted for being gay and committed suicide by eating cyanide-laced apples), but it's not, and Jobs himself denied it: 'I wish we'd thought of it that way.'
Alan Mathison Turing , the father of computer science, was persecuted for being gay and committed suicide by eating apples containing cyanide The real reason was that Jobs was working on an apple farm at a time when the US phone book was alphabetical and apples starting with A were at the top of the list. Also, and most importantly, Jobs thought the word 'Apple' weakened the sharpness of the word 'computer' and made the company sound more approachable. So the company opened up, and the computer designed by Woz was titled "Apple Ⅰ". Due to its convenience and cost effectiveness, Apple I was a success and Jobs and Woz officially started to run the company.
The Apple I first generation Apple computer sold for $666.66 and was opened for sale in July 1976. On August 26, 2016, the 40th anniversary of Apple Computer, the rarest Apple I in existence, made and hand-built by Steve Jobs himself, was auctioned off for $815,000.
McIntosh
The success of the Apple I led to the creation of the Apple II. The Apple II was Apple's most profitable model for a long time, and in 1980, Apple went public, and the company was in the ascendant. But behind the boom were growing cracks, and Jobs' unbridled personality became even more unrestrained after his success. He often attended meetings without his shoes on, interrupted without courtesy, berated his colleagues, and attacked the work product of other project teams. These behaviors caused resentment among the rest of management. Then later, with the dismal Apple III project and the mediocrity of Lisa, and with IBM products overtaking Apple in sales, Jobs was cut loose and placed in a marginal project group at the company. Similar to a laboratory, the project team was dedicated to an ambitious and unattainable ideal: to build computers with simple graphical interfaces that any home could have. The goal was so distant that, before Jobs arrived, it was a loose project team that would stop working every now and then to play a game of pool. When Jobs entered the group with his intense control and wild imagination, the team immediately erupted into violent conflict. Everyone found it too difficult to work with Jobs. The original head of the project team ran straight to the top of the company for a showdown, accusing Jobs of being a very bad manager. However, considering that the project was really marginal and enough for Jobs to toss around without letting him meddle in other projects of the company, the management finally approved Jobs to stay on.
Jobs knew that the company was accommodating him, but he was satisfied with the feeling that he was "back in the garage, with his own little team". Soon, he recruited people from all over the company and developed a team of talented people. He also tried to pull Watts in, however unfortunately, it was at this time that Watts experienced a plane accident that nearly killed him and lost part of his memory. When he recovered, he decided to leave Apple and return to school to finish his degree. With that, Jobs led a new team and set out to build one of the greatest products in the history of computers, the Macintosh .
Steve Jobs holds the winning Macintosh One of the best features of the Macintosh McIntosh is the graphical interface. This was the result of Xerox's research. Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center was founded in 1970, 3,000 miles away from its headquarters and thus free from the commercial pressures of the company to conduct ideal academic research. It was in this environment that they invented the desktop concept, and the graphical user interface: the GUI. It was a genius idea, but Xerox didn't know how to capitalize on it. In Apple's second round of funding in 1979, Xerox's venture capital arm wanted to get in on the action, and Jobs made an offer: agree to let Apple visit Xerox's research center, and let Xerox invest $1 million. Xerox agreed. When Apple went public a year later, the $1 million investment returned $17.6 million in revenue, but Apple was the real beneficiary of the deal. Xerox scientists were shocked that the company was giving away their valuable research, while those back East had never appreciated the beauty of a graphical interface. When the Apple expedition team, which included Jobs, first saw the GUI on display, they were all stunned. "You're sitting on a gold mine," Jobs exclaimed, "and I can't believe Xerox didn't take advantage of this technology. He later recalled, "I saw the future of the computer industry."
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center This technology plagiarism by Apple of the Xerox Research Center is sometimes described as one of the worst robberies in industrial history act. Jobs occasionally proudly acknowledged this claim. "At the end of the day, we're just trying to learn as much as we can about the best invention ever made and then apply it to what we're doing." He said, "Didn't Picasso say that good artists just copy, great artists plagiarize for inspiration." It's also true that if Apple had never seen the results of the Xerox Research Center, those results might have been buried there until they appeared sporadically on the market again years later. And the personal computer would have continued to be a character-only display for quite some time, continuing to remain a niche product. Apple set design standards in the use of graphical interfaces that have been used industry-wide for years.
On January 24, 1984, the McIntosh was released. By this time, the blue giant IBM had overtaken Apple as the world's number one computer company in terms of sales. Steve Jobs exclaimed at the launch: "IBM wants to own everything ...... Can we let IBM dominate the entire computer industry? Can we let IBM control the entire information age? Will George Orwell's description come true?"
Banishment
There is no doubt that the Macintosh was a groundbreaking product, with a graphical interface that made the sophisticated, beige body of the Macintosh a work of art compared to the large, clunky, character-only computers of its time. When it was released, people were amazed by it. But it was also a step ahead of its time, and its problems were obvious: while the computers of its time flashed dull green letters on a dark screen, the Macintosh displayed the elegant fonts the user wanted in pixels, so the latter took up 20 or 30 times more memory than the former. This was more than the hardware could handle at the time, resulting in the McIntosh being beautifully but slowly running and underpowered. This, coupled with Jobs' adamant refusal to use a fan, which he considered too noisy, led to the McIntosh being so poorly cooled that it was even nicknamed the "beige toaster".
For the first few months, McIntosh sold well; but as people became aware of its shortcomings, sales plummeted. Yet even with the poor sales, we cannot ignore the important role that the advent of McIntosh played in the history of human technology: in the early stages of McIntosh's development, Steve Jobs encouraged the involvement of a familiar figure in the creation of the software: Bill Gates. Jobs and Bill Gates, both born in 1955, both midway through school, both energetic, and both shining stars in the field of personal computers. The two men's friendship was complicated: their personalities were very different, both considered themselves smarter than the other, and both maintained a competitive and collaborative relationship with each other at the same time. At the time of McIntosh's development, Apple's annual sales had reached $1.5 billion, while Microsoft's were only $100 million, and Gates was nowhere near as well known as Jobs. So it was with a touch of condescension that Jobs invited Gates to make software for the Mac. "It's not like we really need you guys, this thing we're making is great." Gates disliked this attitude from Jobs, but he signed on to develop graphical interface versions of software for the Mac: Word and Excel.
Jobs and Gates had a gap between the two at the time, but they worked together quite well. But then, on the eve of the McIntosh release, Gates announced that Microsoft planned to develop a Windows operating system for IBM personal computers with a graphical interface, which made Jobs furious. Jobs called Gates in and yelled, "I trust you and you're stealing from us!" Gates sat calmly, looked Jobs straight in the eye and retorted, "Well, Steve, I think we can look at this a different way. It's closer to this right now - we both have a rich neighbor named Xerox, and when I broke into their house to steal the TV, I found out you'd already moved it." This quote has since become a classic.
With Apple's main projects, the Apple III and Lisa, having previously faltered, McIntosh was the last straw. After the failure, Jobs was fired from the company he founded in 1985.
There is a key figure to mention here: John Scully. Scully was the former president of PepsiCo's Pepsi division, and was recommended by a headhunter to take over the presidency in 1982 when Mike Markkula, Apple's president and one of the first Apple investors, was ready to step down. Scully was an upper-class honors student, calm and extremely good at marketing, but with little passion for the product. In fact, compared to Steve Jobs, he was slightly more mediocre. But at that point in time, he had a great resume and was an excellent choice to succeed Markkula. Jobs himself jumped at the position, but he also knew he wasn't good enough. So, he personally invited Scully to take the position. Under Jobs' constant compulsion, Scully was quickly won over and agreed to join Apple.
Jobs, Scully, and Wozniak today appear to be less about finding a new president for Apple and more about Jobs trying to take control of Scully and and in turn hogging the power of Apple management. He almost succeeded. Several walks and false modesty impressed Scully, and the famous line "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to take a chance to change the world?" more than anything else, defeated Scully's hesitant heart. It's such a famous quote that it's inspiring to hear it. But if you think about it, it's wrong. Steve Jobs put 'selling sugar water' and 'changing the world' in opposition to each other, as if the two were incompatible. In fact, if selling computers - a conglomeration of electronic components - can change the world, why not selling Coke? In 1971, Coca-Cola launched Hilltop, an ad that linked Coke to human connection and celebrated what love means to the world. It became one of the greatest commercials of all time.
Jobs did take control of Scully and increased his voice in the company's affairs. But as McIntosh sales waned, the McIntosh team eventually fractured, Apple was filled with chaos and dysfunction, and many people left the company. Jobs became more erratic and exposed his low management skills. Scully asked Jobs to leave his management position in the McIntosh division for company reasons. Jobs was stunned, and his behavior took a major swing, retorting that Scully didn't understand the product, mismanaged it, and had been letting himself down, even breaking down in tears. Scully bit her nails and listened to all the complaints, saying she would ask the board to let Jobs leave the management post for a new research lab. Jobs wasn't having it and hated Scully's betrayal. Eventually, he was ready to stage a coup and kick Scully out. However, word leaked out and the two confronted each other in a board meeting, where Jobs pointedly criticized Scully, the opposite of the friendship previously displayed. Scully finally snapped, asking the board to vote, "Me, or Steve, your choice." Management had long since run out of patience with Jobs' childishness, and the vote ended with Jobs being thrown out of the company he had founded.
Steve Jobs never forgave Scully for his supposed 'betrayal'. In fact, take a complete look at the whole thing and you'll see that Scully was the biggest victim. He wasn't good enough to run Apple, but Jobs did everything he could to poach him, taking a low profile by saying he wanted to learn from someone as senior as Scully, but actually using the guise of humility to control him. And Scully's pressure to move Jobs out of the McIntosh division, which he couldn't control, to a new lab was actually a compromise to reduce the damage Jobs was doing to the company's management and to accommodate his feelings, which bordered on a plea in the face of repeated accusations against Jobs. Unfortunately, the young and exuberant Jobs didn't appreciate it and led the charge to stage a coup to get rid of Scully. It could be argued that Scully did not want to fire Jobs, who had long been convinced of his personal charisma; however, Jobs attacked his business standards and personal abilities, which made it impossible for him to step down and had to show his hand to let the board choose between the two.
Geek Park GIF Conference 2016 At the 2016 Geek Park GIF Innovation Conference, Geek Park brought John Scully to China and asked him to talk about what happened back then. I happened to be there at the time. It was a mistake to let Steve Jobs go," a gray-haired Scully said with regret. Maybe he and I could have made Apple better together." To this day, he still thinks they were best friends and had many good times. But that may not have been Jobs' understanding. When Jobs left Apple, the logistics department found a picture frame on his office floor, containing a photo of Jobs and Scully having a lively conversation, with an inscription underneath 'To great ideas, great experiences, and a great friendship! John" The glass frame had been broken and appeared to have been thrown to the floor by Jobs. He has not spoken a word to Scully since then.
Steve Jobs went through a down period after he left Apple. And Apple, with Scully at the helm, was having a good time at first, thanks to its excellent marketing skills. This increased Jobs' sorrow. Fortunately, after selling his stock holdings in Apple, he was still rich. So, he threw himself into a new creative project to build a new computer company: NeXT. He then let himself go, launching a series of dazzling products that were always market failures, which eventually honed his ability to balance perfectionism with commercial value. "A product should be as beautiful where it can't be seen as where it is exposed." Such idealism was taught to him by Jobs' father. In his early years, when Paul Jobs was doing handyman work, even the backs of wooden cabinets had to be made of good wood. Later, when Apple's products were weak, its CEO changed frequently, it lacked a stable new operating system, it was nearly bankrupt, and it had to return to the company by acquiring NeXT, which was also losing money but had the right products and could offer a new operating system, those values came back to Apple after a whacking. It was 1997, a decade later, and Jobs was married, had children, and owned an animation company: the famous Pixar.
Pixar
Pixar was born out of the computer animation division of Lucasfilm, the special effects company set up by famed director George Lucas specifically for Star Wars, and with Lucasfilm at the forefront, the emergence of special effects companies over the past few decades has arguably recreated the model of modern Hollywood cinema. And in 1985, with the first Star Wars film already out, Lucas was embroiled in a divorce and desperate to sell off its computer division. By coincidence, Steve Jobs visited the division and was so impressed that he decided to buy it.
No matter what you say about Jobs' poor character and unruly personality, there's always one thing you can't deny: there's no doubt that Jobs had a genius taste and never missed out on anything of real value. At Reed College, he decided that required classes were too boring and took a break from school. After the break, he often dabbled in the calligraphy class on campus, just because the poster design on campus was very attractive to him, and later, he put the font design he learned into the Mac, which was a precedent in history, and the computer had a beautiful font from then on. The 1984 ad for Macintosh Computer was almost unanimously opposed by the board of directors, but Jobs insisted on adopting it, which made it a classic in the history of advertising. Once again, when the world didn't think much of the animation division, Jobs saved it with $10 million, a 70 percent stake, and several additional investments since then. Years later, when Disney offered $7.4 billion to buy Pixar in a stock swap, Jobs owned 7% of Disney stock, making him Disney's largest individual shareholder. Financial gains aside, since the Oscars were created in 2001 for best animated feature film, Pixar has been shortlisted 13 times and won 10 times, bagging half of the small golds and being the most successful animation company in the program, with three times as many awards as the second place winner - and the second place winner is none other than parent company Disney.
Toy Story, Pixar's groundbreaking film and widely considered by many critics to be one of the best animated films ever made, tells the story of a child's many toys in which the original favorite cowboy doll, 'Woody', is threatened with falling out of favor due to the new toy Buzz Lightyear. The film was polished by Pixar for a long time, and it was also the one with the most involvement from Steve Jobs. The film was released in 1995 and was a huge success, being the top grossing film at the US box office that year. Two years later, Jobs returned to Apple. Looking back now, in addition to being a commercial success, Toy Story also stands as a sort of prophecy. Woody was a tyrannical, snarky character in the early designs of the Pixar-Disney partnership. Pixar later reversed and redrew Woody into the character we now know and wise leader. I have to say that, whether intentionally or not, the story of Woody's character's development resembles that of Steve Jobs himself. The decade between his expulsion from Apple and his return was the decade in which Jobs grew from acerbic tyrant to wise leader.
Return of the King
What a beast, the time limit has finally expired. This famous verse written by Yeats in "Christ Revisited" is not only popular in the famous science fiction work "The Fall of Hyperion", but also quoted in the chapter title of the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, telling the story of Jobs' return to Apple. At the time, Apple had undergone multiple CEO changes, was nearing bankruptcy, and the production line was in disarray. When Jobs returned, he cut out most of the 'junk products'. In one meeting, he drew two lines on the whiteboard, one horizontal and one vertical. On the vertical line, he wrote 'consumer' and 'professional'; on the horizontal line, he wrote 'desktop' and 'portable'. Focus, that was the first change he brought to the company. On top of that, he disbanded the original board of directors. This was done for strategic reasons, but it also had an indefinable relationship with personal grudges. After all, many on the board were involved in his expulsion ten years ago.
Jobs also did one more thing: disbanded the Newton R&D department. If you're a veteran Googler, you may have heard of the Newton project, which was a pretty good handheld personal electronic device in its day, but Jobs hated the stylus and hated the Newton project even more for what it was: it was Scully's favorite project. So he disbanded the Newton division. It turned out to be the right decision. The Newton project had no shortage of top talent, but the product design was too mediocre. Once Jobs freed up that talent, Apple was able to build what would become the iPhone.
Newton, photographed in 2015 at the Wizards.com Apple Arc of Design eventIn 1997, Apple released a new ad proclaiming Steve Jobs the gorgeous return of the king. It's also my favorite ad of all time. We always emphasize order in our lives, following and obeying. Few people dare to break the mold and think, ask questions and create in a different way. And that's exactly what Steve Jobs and Apple promote: seeing genius in the madness.
launch
In order to win the confidence of the market, Steve Jobs took over Apple and did what he does best, releasing new products himself. It was at this point that the event that would eventually lead to the creation of Keynote software took place. At the Macworld conference in Boston on August 6, 1997, Jobs announced a partnership with Microsoft, which was already in its prime, in order to stabilize Apple. The audience fell silent as Bill Gates' face was projected on a giant screen via satellite link. The moment looked like one of those 1984 commercials, with Gates looking down on the room like a big brother, in control of all the talking. Jobs later recalled, "That was the worst and stupidest staging I've ever done." From this point on, Jobs decided that he would personally and strictly control everything on stage from now on. In the biopic Steve Jobs, starring Michael 'The Shark' Fassbender, it was he who opened the film by demanding that all 'security exit' lights on the stage be turned off, to the objections of the security services. This is not theatrical hyperbole, Jobs actually did it.
He didn't like clunky PPTs with a Microsoft design aesthetic, so earlier his presentation tool was Quicktime. Later, he asked the software department directly to design a presentation tool that met his requirements, and he made a list of features. By the time the iPod came out in 2001, Steve Jobs was using an alpha version of Keynote at the launch.
Photo taken at the 2016 Hammer T2 launch, Lao Luo's daily trolling of the iPhoneNow 20 years have passed, Steve Jobs is no longer alive, and Keynote has evolved to version 9.2. Keynote has also evolved to version 9.2. Over the past two decades, Keynote has been used as a presentation tool for many product launches, public speeches, forums and other events. In China, from the "China Cool Union" to Xiaomi, Meizu, Hammer, OnePlus ......, these brands grew up with us and shaped the ever-changing digital industry. I don't know if you have ever noticed the launch of these manufacturers - despite the fierce competition between friends and friends, and the fact that Apple is always the target of "being beaten", their slides are invariably a "tribute" to Apple. Xiaomi's usual 'crash' effect, Meizu's design team behind the launch slides, and Lao Luo's 'comedy show' that brings the media to a frenzy ...... are all using Keynote behind their dazzling launches.
Let's just say that of all the Apple products since '97, Keynote, the software that Steve Jobs used, is probably the least compromised. Or, rather, the one most in line with Jobs' design philosophy. In particular, it's a custom productivity tool, like a hand-built pen, that's somewhat personal. The fact that it was released to the public shows that Jobs was very proud of this product.
Today's Keynote
As of 2013, Keynote and the entire iWork suite are available for free. As long as you have a Mac, you can find it in your software library. As the mobile Internet has grown and Keynote's user base has grown, it's been developed in many creative ways. The growing variety of presentation slides aside, posters, title packages, logo animations, UI prototypes, and even Motion Graphics - products that used to require specialized software and a lot of effort - can all be presented relatively simply in Keynote. In this day and age, we always emphasize the development of personal skills, but it is almost impossible for one person to learn all the skills. Therefore, if you broaden your horizons and master more software like Keynote, which is not too difficult to learn, has a high input/output ratio and is very inclusive, you can definitely improve your productivity and make your work and life easier.
Keynote is a tool, slide lectures are a technique, tools and techniques that are used to assist people. Over the past few years, I've learned a lot from the selfless tutorials shared by many of the greats, and have mastered some of the tools to be able to stick to my creative work. But beyond the technology, what infected me the most was the spirit of those who came before me: technology is what can make the world a better place. Admittedly, there are two sides to everything, and technology is too. There is no pure good or bad in human nature, and evolving science may not always be used for the benefit of humanity. But we, who exist as individuals in society, have a choice over technology. As we continue to explore boundaries, learn to express ideas and find possibilities with tools and technology, maybe, that's what technological progress is all about. The matter itself of learning a little new skill and making more serious, beautiful slides may be nothing; those leaders, colleagues, teachers and classmates may not even notice; and life may seem to go on as usual. But know that all profound change happens beneath the waves: what you're armed with technology is hope for the future and motivation to move forward. Lurking in the work is a small but also powerful, rising desire and quest for beauty. It may be simple and crude, but over time, it can make enough difference in life.
