Former Apple design chief Jony Ive has shared previously unreleased video of Steve Jobs predicting the future when speaking at the International Design Conference in 1983, the year before the Macintosh was unveiled.
The 55-minute talk shows Steve predicting that sales of personal computers will one day exceed those of cars, something Ive says sounded “absurd” at the time …
The video has been added to the Steve Jobs Archive, with Ive writing an introduction.
Steve rarely attended design conferences. This was 1983, before the launch of the Mac, and still relatively early days of Apple. I find it breathtaking how profound his understanding was of the dramatic changes that were about to happen as the computer became broadly accessible. Of course, beyond just being prophetic, he was fundamental in defining products that would change our culture and our lives forever […]
In the talk, Steve predicts that by 1986 sales of the PC would exceed sales of cars, and that in the following ten years, people would be spending more time with a PC than in a car. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he sees as the inevitability that this would be a pervasive new category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He asks that they start to think about the design of these products, because designed well or designed poorly, they still would be made […]
The revolution Steve described over 40 years ago did of course happen, partly because of his profound commitment to a kind of civic responsibility. He cared, way beyond any sort of functional imperative. His was a victory for beauty, for purity and, as he would say, for giving a damn. He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity.
The conference took place in Aspen, with the theme The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be. Steve had given a demonstration of the Lisa the night before his speech.
Jobs began his talk by explaining why he was wearing a bow-tie.
He leans into the microphone. “They paid me sixty dollars, so I wore a tie,” he says, gesturing to the striped bow tie he has paired with a sports jacket and jeans. A grin stretches across his face; the audience laughs. He takes off his jacket, realizes there is nowhere to put it, and drops it to the floor, where it lays in a crumpled heap for the rest of his talk.
The story of the talk is a great read in itself, and the video is embedded toward the bottom of the page.
9to5Mac collage of images from the Steve Jobs Archive and Maxim Berg on Unsplash
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