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Make Something Wonderful

Wednesday, 12 April 2023

The Steve Jobs Archive has released Make Something Wonderful. A collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and emails. It's available to read on the web, through Apple Books, or as an epub download for e-readers. All options are free.

This piece stood out to me from a Q&A at the International Design Conference in Aspen on June 15, 1983, five months after Apple introduced the Lisa computer.

Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically. 

Steve was describing smartphones and the web years before they were possible. It took until the mid-90s before the web was ubiquitous, the early 2000's until Wi-Fi really took off, and it was 2007 before he introduced the iPhone. Apple didn't manage it in that decade, but they laid out the roadmap back in 1983.