For our purposes, Steve Jobs was an industrialist. As a leader of people, as a human with power, as a capitalist—you may have any number of objections to his conduct.

I grant and so stipulate any you like. You can keep reading: I am not here to write his hagiography.

I’m here because you probably don’t understand what Steve Jobs was doing, as a system. No text, no analysis, no history has articulated this in a way that actually satisfies me.

So I’m going to do it for you.

Because Steve Jobs was a system: a human being meshed in the teeth of Moore’s Law so completely, he could influence the shape of history. It’s worth understanding what he was up to.

And because of the way it touched me, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

Miniaturization

Computers were big. You needed a warehouse, or at least a dedicated room, to host one.

Then they weren’t: suddenly, in the 1970’s, they became the size of a houseplant.

What did this mean? What are the consequences of this change? How could you take advantage of it?

Today the answers are so complete they’re baked into our daily lives. But in the 1970’s, none of this was clear at all. Because a computer had never sat, self-contained, on a desk before, no one had a clear answer on what to do with it.

The early ones blinked lights.

Apple exists today because fifty years ago they found an answer to that question. A miniature computer was a tool for amplifying the ambition and cognitive capacity of a human being. Maybe it was other things, but to Apple, that was the single answer. This was a distinct frame clarifying enough to build products around.

Combined with their first-mover advantage, Apple II would go on to print money for over a decade.

Amplification

Jobs recognized that the individual was bounded by all kinds of cognitive and communications constraints and that a computer was a means of relieving them. Raw and youthful, his countercultural leanings fused with the novel leverage of computing in a passion for something unique: a tool for a person, not a business.

The economics now made it possible. Microprocessor abundance took something once scarce and made it mundane.

This trajectory was inescapable for Apple for generations. There was a serious market to sell an individual a first computer. But a much larger market waited for those selling businesses hundreds or thousands of computers in a single transaction.

Apple never cracked the code in its earliest incarnations.

Still, the individual mandate kept them busy.

The Macintosh was, at launch, barely possible. 128 kilobytes of RAM, shipping in the first model, was a punishing constraint that mostly hobbled the product. Quadrupling to 512K later on got things barely toward viable.

It was a continuation in the individual power thesis. A mouse made it possible for people to learn by exploring, not reading a manual or learning a cryptic command language. And a graphical operating system vastly expanded the possible applications of the tool.

You could make art, you could balance the books, you could design a game.

Jobs, in the right place, at the right time, knowing the right guy, and generationally tenacious enough to pull the narrative and destiny threads to build something with the alchemy, witnessed a burst of power and money from enabling human creativity. At a formative age.

So with the Macintosh, he kept chasing it. The Macintosh succeeds, not commercially, but certainly culturally.

Jobs arrived at computing with more than code. He’s quoted endlessly about the calligraphy class he dropped into, inspiring the text capabilities of the Macintosh a decade later. But this capability became crucial.

Writing is a load bearing structure in human history and culture. The Macintosh, thus, becomes a fertile substrate for the desktop computing revolution. Which Apple enabled with another miniaturization: the laser printer.

This is classic Apple lore. The DTP advantage they earned is what kept the company afloat through its dark period.

But what’s less commonly understood is that this was the Jobs System at its peak expression: taking a thing that was barely possible, making it accessible to everyday people, and creating repeatable, platform leverage through the insight.

Elation

When people misunderstand Steve Jobs, the keynote is often the worst part.

In the legend, Jobs was a master showman: capable of eliciting ecstatic reaction through a unique and charismatic presentation style.

But this isn’t what was happening in an Apple keynote at all.

The keynote was the culmination of years of work. Many design decisions, gambles and supply chain optimizations the audience could not see were the essential piping of any successful product introduction.

The well-to-do technology buyers and journalists in the audience weren’t reacting to a presentation. They were reacting to revelation: a new set of capabilities that they didn’t think were possible, suddenly only a credit card swipe away.

At a certain socioeconomic level, this isn’t a sales presentation.

It’s an engraved invitation to a new version of self.

Now, this may activate your skepticism, but I’m going to introduce some evidence here and it’s going to win so just take a breath and stay with me.

Everyone cites the introduction of the iPhone as the best Jobs keynote. The iPhone keynote is where a talented player cements his economic and cultural victory at a single stroke. It’s a hell of a moment.

But my favorite Jobs keynote is much older. It’s the introduction of the iBook. It’s a very neat computer and everyone is delighted Apple is shipping a consumer-priced portable. This had never quite happened before and it was the dawn of accessibly priced laptops for students. (He keeps nailing that timing, huh?)

The magic, though, is not the iBook.

The magic is when Jobs picks up the iBook, carries it across the room, and it goes right on loading web pages. The effect is so fluid the audience almost doesn’t notice it.

Then they realize: the thing is floating in midair. Jobs helps by passing a hoop around it, his trademark showmanship earning the indulgence. No one had ever seen this before.

Everyone in the audience realizes at once: this internet thing they’re newly obsessed with?

Now you can do it sitting on a couch. In a comfy chair.

On the porch outside.

They have to recompute their entire relationship with computing in that moment. It’s now more flexible, more inviting, and more attuned to their existence. No longer do they need to commune with the computer at a special shrine in their house. It was now a portable companion in a meaningfully networked way.

The keynote is the culmination of serious engineering and business preparation. Bringing this to market required software in the OS, an interface on the hardware, a technology license agreement with a vendor, and plenty of manufacturing.

The result was in front of them. Available for preorder.

The magic of the Jobs keynote was that it had the air of a far-future concept video, but ended with a product you could have.

People weren’t anticipating the spectacle.

People were anticipating how computing was about to change their lives.

Identification

It can be hard to understand today, but Apple meant something to people in the 90’s.

Which means when it was close to death, that meant something too.

The Macintosh secured its place in the future with an aggressive education marketing program. Apple gave students discounts, they made Macs available at university bookstores. So for many people, the Macintosh become load-bearing on an identity level. It was a first introduction to computing, and it was a tiny home in cyberspace that was specifically theirs.

In my childhood, the Mac was an invitation to a new form of exploration and expression. The icons, the visual system, the smiling Mac: all of these were bids for me to venture forward in a new and exciting direction.

We can A/B test the effectiveness of Apple’s approach: I never found the same passion to figure out whatever the hell was going on with DOS.

With the Mac, I didn’t need anyone to teach me. I could teach myself.

Some version of this was operational across the entire coalition of the so-called Apple Faithful. The Macintosh was such fertile ground it could inspire everything from completely new publishing tools to Myst. Real people had to create this stuff.

I don’t think we accurately weight how hard it is to build new tools. The Mac was explosion in new kinds of ways to be creative. The counterculture frame that first animated Jobs and early Apple was imprinted into the machine itself.

And all of this meant something to us, on an emotional level. t was a trustworthy contract with computing: a domain we knew to be human, humane, and creatively expansive. It was the beginnings of a porous boundary, as the computer became part of us, let us reach beyond our fingertips into something weird but wonderful.

The return of Jobs and Apple’s return to health wasn’t just a personality cult. It was a redemption of a promise about to lapse: computing would make us more powerful. Not businesses, not governments, not Big Brother.

Real people, like you and me. None of the keynotes would have landed if they didn’t create a material consequence in our daily existence.

But the iMac has to be seen in the context of its moment. The internet was important. Personal computers really mattered. Something big was happening. A future was taking off.

Here was a promise that we belonged in it.

Exhaustion

The iPhone, then, is a culmination of this effect. To watch its introduction today is a stunning time capsule, an inventory of all the ways that people were finding their relationship to technology grating.

Miniaturization, in this presentation, completed its individual human trajectory: from warehouse to desktop, to laptop, now to the pocket.

Previous phones accomplished the job of an audio conversation but they weren’t true networked computers. The iPhone, by contrast, did everything you expected of a computer, including being broadly flexible in its applications.

Like the Macintosh, the iPhone was barely possible: battery life barely adequate, wireless networking sluggish. It didn’t even have an application development story for third parties.

But even in its roughest state, it was so much better than the terrible phones we’d been tolerating.

People note that the Apple keynotes have lost something of late: everything is incremental, they don’t have their same magic. We’ll never know the counterfactual where Steve Jobs kept at it past 2011.

But if he had, the system would encounter a serious headwind.

Miniaturization was the silent partner Jobs collaborated with for generations. Once you get small enough to hold in the hand, miniaturization runs out of steam in terms of dramatic lifestyle impacts.

The Apple Watch is a good example. A lovely device, but having a tiny computer on the wrist provides only an incremental transformation compared to reaching the pocket. The pocket was a comparative step change: the full, complete internet anywhere you were, any time. The watch actually makes the internet harder to use again.

Supporting this argument, Apple had one more bit of magic after Jobs: AirPods. Miniaturization’s arc continued further, getting to tiny computers and a personal network that genuinely reshaped people’s everyday relationship to their computer for the better. There were other earbuds of similar architecture, but there was an Alto before the Mac.

Technology is just one part of the job: culture is the rest.

Summation

Jobs was a culture hacker whose medium was the technology landscape. He mapped it into a means of individual power amplification, always in search of a way to make someone a more technologically expressive and comfortable version of themselves.

He enjoyed a specific tailwind that supported his genius: timing against Moore’s Law.

His gift was to build things that didn’t exist upon things that once could not exist. He was, in other words, performing arbitrage against an unevenly distributed future, a broker with keen access and insight ahead of larger consensus.

He was not a fortune teller, nor an oracle. He had many misses, from NeXT’s hardware to the CD-R explosion. But you don’t play the game without losing a few hands.

What’s poorly understood about Jobs is that he was following a compass that other people don’t use to navigate a frontier that not everyone could see. Taste, charisma, presentation style: he had all of these things.

But they were secondary to the actual system: building the barely possible because it would change your relationship to the world if he sold it to you.

As a new technology cycle is taking off, the Jobsian frame is underutilized. We are surrounded by the consequence of spreadsheets and the shadows of unit economics.

New capabilities are emerging, and it’s not obvious what they mean. But I think it would be very interesting to ask, as often as possible, how a newly rewritten technology rule changes individual human performance.

Get the timing right on that, you get to dance with Moore’s Law, too.