Of all my teenage memories, the original iPhone unveiling remains one of the clearest. I cringe every time I say that, but it's not like I meant for that to happen: it just happened to be the one time when anticipation had a payoff that seemed to justify months and years of speculation. I can't think of a single other experience—not in theaters, not with new albums or books, not with anything apart from sheer human connection—where reality somehow outstripped imagination.

I wasn't an Apple obsessive. I'd completely ignored the iPod's ascent, up until I got one as a present and realized: Oh, this is GOOD. Apple was starting to demonstrate that its talent for product design was leagues beyond any other company's, but the products it was offering didn't intrigue me. I was more of a Nintendo fanboy, and I bought into every wild rumor. Before they announced the Wii, I was convinced it would have shapeshifting controllers, and no amount of sheer physical impossibility would convince me otherwise. "Apple's making a phone" was intriguing, maybe even exciting, but the future still felt like the Motorola RAZR. I owned a rinky-dink Palm Pilot and hoped to one day have a Blackberry; who daydreamed about something as pedestrian as a phone?

In its iconic unveiling, it takes Steve Jobs six and a half minutes to reveal the iPhone's actual design. That's not just showmanship: it takes him that long to explain the conceptual foundation that led to the iPhone being designed the way it is. It's been nearly two decades since the iPhone was released; in those two decades, none of what Jobs says in those first six minutes has changed. The iPhone was the culmination of his vision, not of a phone, but of a computer. It changed society in part because it achieved the thing Jobs spent his lifetime trying to achieve. And its unveiling was the culmination of Jobs' attempt to translate concept into concrete shape: the perfect fusion of idea and  articulation.

Steve Jobs is a controversial figure, among both techies and political lefties. Tech nerds will insist that Jobs is the lesser of "the two Steves;" his partner, Steve Wozniak, was and is the archetypal nerd, not only brilliant but overjoyed with the prospect of fiddling around with technical nuances, trying to get a machine to work. Lefties sneer at what they see as Jobs' artistic pretenses, his attempts to equate what he devoted his lifetime to with the Beatles or Bob Dylan. To both sorts, Jobs is a salesman rather than a thinker or an artist; he existed to promote Product, which they see as the antithesis to either technological prowess or artistic expression.

It doesn't help that Jobs is the patron saint of the bullshit-heavy tech bro, the one who cares about econ rather than emacs, "UX" rather than genuine human connection. Like all pseudo-religious figures, much of the dogma he's inspired is garbage at best, abusive at worst. It's hard to be someone's hero without some of your hero-worshippers turning to absolute shit.

But Jobs became one of my heroes, in a way that I hope doesn't make me shit by default. I adore Steve Wozniak, but it's Jobs who ultimately defined Apple, both in the 80s and in the 00s. And I think that Jobs' artistic "pretenses" weren't pretense at all. Industrial design isn't the same as recording music, but a similar spirit can be found in both—even if it would be silly to look for the soul of a computer in the same place you look for soul in music. 

(You can find predatory capitalism in both places too: the people who scorn the Beatles-and-Bob-Dylan comparisons have to really stretch to avoid how mercenary those musicians are and were. Dylan has repeatedly shrugged off attempts to make him some artistic icon, and emphasized how money-driven a lot of his endeavors were. The Beatles, meanwhile, made a joke of just how market-driven a lot of their choices were—and they in turn were inspired by Monty Python, another group of artistic visionaries who openly embraced what sheer sell-outs they were willing to be.)

The genius of Jobs lay in his ability to find the intersection of technology and human connection. His tastes weren't flawless, but even his errors were in the name of finding ways to translate technological potential into human meaning—either figuring out how to make computational abstraction something that a layman could understand, or figuring out why it mattered that computers could do what they do. He reduced complexities of technology and language down to terse statements, not because he didn't care about the complexities, but because his focus was on what needed to emerge from those complexities: the one takeaway that would mean something both for the philosophy behind a computer's design and for the person who'd eventually use that computer.

I think a lot about him famously saying, in 1995, that Microsoft had "absolutely no taste:"

Jobs is saying this at a moment that's exactly equidistant from the unveiling of the Macintosh in 1984 and the unveiling of the iPhone in early 2007. At the moment, he's more-or-less just a curiosity in the tech world; nobody expects him to become a major player ever again. His major project is Pixar's Toy Story—and if you want Jobs' artistic bona fides, it's that it was his vision that brought Pixar to life, though Pixar is similarly criticized for its ratios of artistic-expression-to-marketing-sheen. 

And the thing he can think to say about Microsoft has to do with... font spacing. His criticism of Gates is that Gates never thinks about how letters appear on a computer screen.

Unless you're a font nerd, you probably don't think of Steve Jobs as the patron saint of digital typography. Hell, most font nerds don't think of Steve Jobs that way. But the soul Jobs brought to computers came down to his focus on making computers more cultured, where "culture" had nothing to do with snobbery or pretenses and everything to do with simple human connection. His criticism of Microsoft can be understood as: "They don't really think about what it means to make computers for people." And the reason he is revered by people who revere him, the reason why a site exists just to document minor stories about his original reign at Apple, is that he was hellbent on working out how to make a computer express itself to the people who, one way or another, were going to have to use it.

If Jobs had just invented modern digital typographic systems, it would ironically be much easier for the people who despise him to recognize his accomplishments. Isolate any one feature or function or design that he helped introduce to computing, and it's easy to think of it as humanistic.

But Jobs understood that he'd never be able to "just" release a system for typesetting. Nobody thinks of computers as typesetting machines first and foremost. There's no product there. The only way to advocate for any one of the things he cared about was, paradoxically, to build a bigger system. He spent his career working on gigantic feats of engineering and design, hardware and software both, because he needed to reach the point at which all the different pieces of what he worked on would congeal to become a feasible consumer good—the thing he gets sneered at for focusing on. The thing which he learned mattered from... you know, the Beatles. Because he'd spent his childhood listening to Rubber Soul and Revolver and realizing that, in order to make all those advances in "the state of pop music," in order to fit in all those moments of vulnerability and political commentary and sheer psychedelia, the Beatles had to write a bunch of very good pop songs, and sequence them in a way that turned the albums they were on into pop iconography.

The typesetting is, at best, a pop song. (It's really more like the one weird instrument that makes that one great pop song so darn memorable.) The product itself is the album. And without the mammoth vision that defines the end result, you have, at best, an artistic curiosity. Far easier to "respect," but respected only by the handful of people who know that it exists.

The tech world has a phrase that it loves: Minimum Viable Product, or MVP for short. It's the simplest possible thing you can make that will sell. Conventional wisdom is: you make that product, because it gets you the funds to expand. It's why companies like Facebook and Uber and whatnot all started with a seemingly-simple core product—something actually useful, even likable—and gradually choked their own products to death with their sheer megalomania. The Minimum Viable Product makes them their millions, wedges them into our lives, and then lets them try to leverage and coerce their way towards billions.

Those start-up CEOs are the worst of the assholes who like Steve Jobs. But they seem to overlook the fact that their Minimum Viable Product philosophy directly contradicts Jobs' own lifelong strategy. Jobs never started small. When he left Apple and started NeXT, his first computer retailed for $9,999. That's an absolutely garbage amount of money, but it's what the Big-Ass Thing he created had to cost. Just as the original Macintosh was sold for a prohibitive $2,500, and the original iPhone sparked outrage when it sold for $600. Yes, those prices more-or-less made all of Jobs' original products available only to people with considerable means—but they were also the prices that let him sell the thing he'd actually made, the thing that incorporated all those different pieces he was passionate about, in a way that let him make an honest sale.

There's a lot to criticize about Jobs, and about Apple in general. Both are flawed and have made mistakes that range from incompetence to venality to corruption. But it feels telling that, at the moment, Google and Facebook and Amazon—all companies who take pride in how little they directly charge their consumers—are actively hemorrhaging workers, laying off tens of thousands of people at once, while Apple remains relatively steady. It feels telling that the companies which claim to be Apple's successors largely operate by selling out their users, exploiting lax regulatory laws, and generally degrading the world, while Apple's shittiness largely extends to "charging more money for things than people would like." 

While I don't feel comfortable defending Apple's business practices, I would say that Apple's a less corrosive cultural force than virtually all of the tech companies that operate on its level. And I'd argue that the reason why is that, from the start, Apple's "peers" have operated by trying to sell the Minimum Viable Product—whether it was Microsoft's anticompetitive business dealings, Google's attempts to offer the world Everything for the price of Totally Free, or Amazon's relentless pursuit of the cheapest possible consumable good. To the extent that Apple has a soul, however dinged-up and dirty, it's that Apple tries to make products worth actually paying money for—and that the "worth actually paying money for" part involves its trying to find that link between technological potential and human meaning.

Jobs and Apple get called minimalist. They're viewed as "reducing" the inherent complexity of computers down to accessible, "user-friendly" paradigms. But you can only call them minimalist, paradoxically, if you accept that their ambitions were about as maximalist as you can get in tech: making their devices' purposes as open-ended as humanly possible, producing hardware and software (and micro-managing the integrations between the two), and conceiving of "user experience" as the connective tissue between both, where the hardware articulates the software and vice versa. 

If your only interest in technology has to do with the backend ("how do I tell computers to do what they can do?"), it's easy to dismiss Apple's focus on interface and experience as mere frippery at best, anti-freedom at worst. If your focus on what Apple makes is on computers as a commercial good, you might criticize Apple the other way around, dismissing the human potential of computers as just another consumer distraction, and attacking Apple for creating products with popular appeal, and for honing in on just what it is that helps drive sales.

From both angles, it's easy to dismiss Steve Jobs as a tech figure. Either way, he's the guy who popularized computers while ruining them, taking their potential for cultural or social impact and turning them into just another vessel for distraction and consumption and waste. But either view misses that artistry is always the negotiation of technique and production, the pathfinding between what-can-be-done and what-will-be-seen. The rearticulation of vast complexity as seeming simplicity is art. And in a computing environment, philosophy becomes uniquely tangible: the what and the why and the how fuse into a singular whole, with abstract ideas about how a computer ought to work lending themselves to literal symbolic expressions that in turn become the material reality of working with a computer in the first place.

The lasting impact of Jobs, beyond the iPhone or even the personal computer, will be that he demonstrated this in a major way. He taught us how to think about computers—not about their potential, but about ours. He is not the only tech titan, and you can argue that he isn't the most profound or influential or even intelligent of them, but he is by far the most popularly beloved, because he spent his life translating the things he imagined computers doing into their reality. He found a path between the idea and the articulation. And in doing so, he showed that building digital worlds is a kind of art, as plainly as music or film or literature, because the challenge is fundamentally the same thing: what he called culture and what I keep calling expression, or the process of taking what is hypothetically possible and giving it form. Not just technical form, but meaningful form. The kind of thing that people not only see but immediately grasp. The kind of thing that makes sense to us as if it was made to lie in the palm of our h—

ok I'll stop

Back to those six-and-a-half minutes.

Before he reveals the face of the iPhone, Steve Jobs walks us through a series of conceptual explanations.

The first one, of course, is that Apple isn't just revealing an iPod or a phone or a "breakthrough Internet communications device"—his phrase, not mine—but a single product that encapsulates all three.

The second is the explanation of why the iPhone won't have a physical keyboard—that this kind of hardware immediately dates a device, keeping it from receiving meaningful updates or enhancements of any kind.

And the third, which he explains after the iPhone's hardware has been revealed but before we see a mock-up of its screen, is that the phone has been built around the human finger. There's no mouse, obviously. There's no stylus, either. Its interface was built around the forefinger—everything from the size of its app icons to its interface buttons to the original iconic lock screen.

It takes him fifteen minutes to go through all that, and then he turns the iPhone on for the first time. The very first thing he does is unlock the device—just swipes his finger from left to right. Then he locks the phone, so he can show his audience again.

The second feature he displays is scrolling through a list. That's it: just swiping his finger. The audience gasps.

Over the next half hour, the only new tech feature Jobs demonstrates is rotating the phone to adjust its interface. It isn't until about the 45-minute mark that he opens up a photo, explains "pinching" to his audience, and zooms into the photo with only his fingers. Again: gasps. The app interfaces—look at the sixteen programs we've invented for this brand-new system!—are nice, but the real wow moments are when Jobs demonstrates the little things a system like this lets you do.

The grand climax of the demonstration is the Maps app, of all things. Jobs opens the map. He zooms in and out. He looks for a Starbucks—and, voila!, pins fall onto the map. He taps one of the pins. Then he places a call then and there, not just from the phone but from the map—and when he does, the background of that phone call is the photo he zoomed into and set up as his wallpaper. Its a triple-pirouette demonstration whose technical implementation is no less astonishing than the theatrical architecture of the moment.

You can try to delineate the technological accomplishments that make that moment possible, but you don't need to. The structure of the iPhone's unveiling delineates it all for you. It follows a simple pattern: Steve Jobs explains the human distinction between the iPhone and everything that came before it, and then he delves into technical wonkery as he explains what made this particular feature possible, and then he touches the screen. Human intent first, technical underpinnings second, and then the inherent theatricality that comes from simply using the device. 

It's hard not to watch that unveiling and realize: every moment of this is a product. Every interaction, every swipe, every rotate, every new interface, every new placement of a menu, is something that could have defined an entire new product line-up. Hell, the iPods at the time would loudly advertise the transition from clickable navigation buttons to a spinnable wheel, or from black-and-white to color, or the advent of video playback. The iPhone took dozens of things that each would have defined a year's worth of product evolution, and placed them all together. It didn't just unify them—it sequenced them. It created something that people could call "simple" with a straight face, even as it emphasized its own complexity.

As a geeky teen who'd lost his mind over the Nintendo Wii just a year earlier, it was impossible not to understand that the iPhone was simply in a different league. It took the wildest rumors and exceeded them—and exceeded them, not by doing the physically impossible, but by taking all of its different pieces and connecting the dots between them, finding connections too fine-tuned and granular to be worth most people's imaginations.

Douglas Adams, a lifelong admirer of both Apple and the Beatles, once wrote that the difference between a Beatles record and any other bands' was that, the first time he put on Rubber Soul or Revolver or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he couldn't entirely comprehend what he was listening to. The sounds were too bewilderingly different from what he'd been expecting. It was only through gradually listening that he realized it was because he was listening to something stranger and better than anything he'd ever heard before. 

That, to me, is the pinnacle of artistic achievement. It's the way I felt when I first discovered my favorite novels, my favorite albums, my favorite films, my favorite people. And it's the way I felt when I first saw the iPhone. You have to wonder whether Steve Jobs learned a thing or two from his and Adams' favorite band. 

Tech bros love talking about disruption. They take their Minimum Viable Product, their feature that's just compelling enough to convince a million people to download the free version of the app, and discuss it like it's going to change the world (in the sense of making them a billion dollars). Peter Thiel, would-be patron saint of start-up bros and neo-Nazis alike, talks about this being the most exciting feeling in tech: the sense of a flash-in-the-pan that means you'll temporarily have a monopoly that lets you wring some money from the world.

This, they claim, is Steve Jobs' legacy. Be loud and glib and get bored people's attention and get venal people erect enough to throw more money at you. All you need is the One Little Big Idea that slips that check under your door. It's the same mindset as the douchebags with guitars who think that a song or two about how evil "they" are will make them the next Bob Dylan, or the junky pop-music dipshits who think that the Beatles were the Beatles because they thought that love was neat.

I would argue that Jobs' real legacy is close to the exact opposite. It's a demonstration that an idea doesn't have to be banal in order to succeed, that inherent simplicity matters less than strived-for elegance, that convoluted inner workings can nonetheless yield something utterly iconic. My takeaway from Jobs is that the Maximum Viable Product is worth reaching for: those pie-in-the-sky ambitions that look past the individual possibilities to grasp at the gigantic world-changing ones, well, those might not be so pie-in-the-sky after all. It might be possible to change the world, just as it's possible for a single moment or experience to transform an entire life.

For me, the life-changing experience wasn't just the iPhone—it was the way in which it was revealed. Not just the product, but the explanation: the step-by-step performance that took an immensely complicated idea and turned it, not just into plain English, but into theatre: taking all those things which should have been obstacles and turning them into dance steps, and revealing in the process that those things which seem most daunting and impossible-to-resolve may, in fact, be the wellspring for the most exciting opportunities.

I'm talking all this out, not to fanboy, but to lay down a foundation. It matters to me, not only as a story in and of itself, but as a way of clarifying what comes next.

to be continued etc