40 Years Later: Apple 3.0 (Jean-Louis Gassée)

immense @gassee 40 Years Later: Apple 3.0 | Monday Note

Simplifying, but without distorting the key concept, humankind needed a more flexible means of expression than hieroglyphs, mere pictures on a cave wall, and invented alphabets and numerals, symbols that have no intrinsic meaning. Combined into sentences, phrases, and formulae, these symbols gave us tremendous power to think, persuade, seduce, and calculate. The same set of symbols could be used in sacred texts, Elizabethan poetry, Marcus Aurelius’ meditations, Wall Street pitches, and General Relativity. 

But our invention was too much for our central nervous system: We had trouble memorizing long strings of symbols; few people could do long division in their head, let alone extract cubic roots. 

Luckily, we are the Homo Faber, the tool-making species, and thus began a long procession of computing, storage, and communication devices, from the abacus to electro-mechanical devices and on to big, expensive computers called mainframes. Electronics moved from tubes to transistors to integrated circuits, propelled by our unquenchable thirst for symbol manipulation. In the early 70s, 8-bit microprocessorsappeared and the personal computer revolution started.  

I saw the Apple ][ for what it represented: A machine that extended the reach of your mind and your body, a device that powered five key activities: Think, Organize, Communicate, Learn, and Play. 

Apple 1.0 was a turbulent period: The rise of the Apple ][, its loss to the IBM PC and Microsoft; the hope and trouble with the Macintosh… 

Apple 2.0 began in late 1996 when Jobs managed what turned out to be a reverse acquisition of Apple… 

We’re now in the Apple 3.0 era, under Tim Cook’s leadership… 

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Apple won’t become boring with age. The company is just as exciting — and occasionally as unexpected — as they were 40 years ago. …