As of this writing Apple has briefly attained an estimated market valuation of $800 billion USD, easily making it the most valuable public company on the planet. For perspective on this achievement, this figure is roughly 2.2 times the GDP of Singapore.
Furthermore, January 9th, 2017 marked ten years since the unveiling of the iPhone by Apple’s then-CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs. Before this point, having music on your phone usually meant a tinny, 8-bit ringtone. And accessing the internet not via computer? A rare occurrence. Touchscreen controls? Wasn't that on an episode of 'Star Trek?'
The iPhone changed all of this.
Opinions on Apple and the products it releases can be divisive even in the most friendly of settings, but it isn’t hard to recognise the impact the “three-in-one” device -- as Jobs first described it -- has had on the world of technology. The top smartphone operating systems of 2007 included Blackberry, Palm and Windows CE, while Swedish phone maker Nokia was one of the leading handset developers 10 years ago. Now, almost every new smartphone model upon release is measured against Apple’s current flagship product. The word "app" is now a regular part of the 21st-Century lexicon.
And, oh yes, the iPhone looked, and felt, like nothing before. Design, as it turned out, was not only how it looked, but how it worked.
Steve jobs liked to say that Apple is a company that resides at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. As we draw further away from his passing 6 years ago one of the most fascinating questions we can ask about Jobs is how, and to what extent, was he an artist? His company developed and sold beautifully made computers and devices while name-dropping, in its advertising, artistic figures such as Pablo Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock, Ansel Adams, and Miles Davis, among others. Was that comparison unwarranted? Or did Jobs, through his work, transcend the transactional and eventually become like one of the artists he so admired?
It’s easy to imagine how, if Jobs had been a composer, the movies could have shown his mind at work:strolling beneath the redwoods, composer-Steve might hear a snatch of melody in birdsong and, later, fold it into a concerto. (That’s the sort of creative process shown in an Apple ad, featuring the composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, who writes music on various Apple devices.)
But this is a poor approximation of what the real Jobs did: his achievements were far more extraordinary, if harder to visualize.
“Art” is a capacious term. We typically imagine artists to be solitary people creating art by hand. But many artists work in more expansive, disembodied ways. For example, we all recognize that film directors are artists, even though the work of directing more closely resembles running a medium-sized enterprise as it often involves the management of teams and budgets on a large scale. For example, Jeff Koons employs a hundred and fifty people, and the art works those workers create, at his direction, sell for tens of millions of dollars. The same goes for Norman Foster, whose design firm has become a global concern far larger than the single creative genius who founded it. Clearly, a vast distance separates Koons’s and Foster’s studios from the world of high-tech device manufacturing, but—at least in theory—the difference could be one of scale rather than kind. If a giant sculpture or building built to order by a team of employees can be a work of art, it’s at least possible that mass-produced computers could be considered works of art.
Sculptures are meant to be contemplated and interpreted, whereas computers and buildings are meant to be used. Computers are tools, and, as such, they should disappear into the background—you’re supposed to forget about them and concentrate on your own work. From this perspective, computers are products of “design,” rather than “art.” A well-designed computer might facilitate thinking and creativity; it might be, in Jobs’s famous phrase, “a bicycle for the mind.” But a computer can’t be, in itself, a work of art, because it carries no message (or messages) and stimulates no point of view. A computer is more like a musical instrument than a piece of music.
This is an eminently reasonable way to think about computers, and yet Jobs never seems to have believed it. He wanted his devices to get out of the way of the creative people who used them. But he also thought that there was a special kind of technological beauty, uniquely realizable in the medium of computers, which itself verged on, and sometimes attained, the status of art. Certainly he aspired to artistic success. In 1984, he had the signatures of the core Macintosh engineers engraved on the inside of the machine; in 1988, introducing the NeXTcube at Davies Symphony Hall, in San Francisco, he held up one of its circuit boards and called it “the most beautiful printed circuit board I’ve ever seen in my life.” (The audience applauded.) He loved “design,” but yearned for something grander and more emotional.
This was inculcated in a young Jobs by his stepfather, Paul, an adept tinkerer and handyman who impressed upon his son that regardless of whether or not one’s work was immediately visible, it was still incumbent that care and pride be taken in its creation. Thus, the inside of a desk or chest of drawers had to be every bit as lovingly sanded and refined as the exterior.
During his long exile from Apple many things changed about Jobs and he underwent a slow maturation process as his sensibilities slowly from the callow to the more profound. For example, while observing the creation of the movie “Toy Story” at Pixar, Jobs found himself in awe of the often turgid, methodical, occasionally inspired development of a filmic work of art that, unlike computers, would long endure beyond its creators. The average useful lifespan of a laptop, desktop, cell phone or tablet is measured in one to three years, after which they invariably become paperweights of doorstops. But art, which can take a far longer development cycle than a product, can remain timeless.
When he did return to Apple, Job did so with that kind of lasting achievement in mind. He wanted to save Apple and defeat his competitors. But he also wanted to create products that embodied a kind of beauty to which he, more than other people, was sensitive, and to communicate through them his own sensibility.
Often, artists are integrators: in many art forms, discrete elements are fused together (melody and rhythm, form and color) to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. Jobs seems to have believed that a similar process applied to computers. When he started making them, in the nineteen-seventies, computers were big piles of parts—you bought a kit, or a blueprint, and then assembled them yourself. This drove him crazy, but also suggested that a new kind of art was possible—one realized through the vastly complex processes of technological integration, during which chips and bits, instead of melody and lyrics, could flow together to make a perfect whole. Jobs hoped that a perfect technological device could be transcendent, or “magical,” as he sometimes put it. It could embody artistic energy, becoming not just a tool but a source of inspiration in its own right.
For any artist, making an art work “come together” is difficult. But the challenges of perfect technological integration are especially problematic. The words “hardware” and “software” don’t do them justice. Languages must be invented and synchronized; components must be designed or acquired; bridges must be built from the physical world of manufacturing to the digital one, in which code unspools. It’s very difficult to hide the seams; imperfect technology products are always devolving into their component parts, which compromises their aesthetic unity. Moreover, unlike a traditional artist, the computer artist must see into the future, guessing which of many different technologies, each maturing at its own rate, will coincide in time. And all of this must be accomplished within the corporate environment—through the hiring and firing of employees, the setting of priorities and agendas, the acquisition of companies, and the creation of teams. In important ways, the computer artist works in a milieu hostile to aesthetic concerns.
It seems crazy to imagine that the outcome of this process might be an artistic product. And yet Jobs often acted as if that were the case. He likened himself and his employees to artists; he deployed his mercurial personality in the ruthless way that artists sometimes do. He cared about his products the way that artists care about their art. Was it all just marketing? When Jobs called a circuit board “beautiful,” was he just using the cult of beauty to sell computers? Personally, I doubt it; I think he was sincere. As for whether he was right, we can all decide for ourselves: many of us own his most beautiful piece of work, the iPhone. Using it, we can ask ourselves whether its deep technological coherence constitutes, in itself, an artistic achievement.
Jobs continues to fascinate not just because he was both brilliant and mean (many very successful people are both gifted and flawed) but because in his mind at least he was engaged in a titanic effort to create art out of technology on a mass scale—a process which was complicated not just aesthetically but morally. (think Foxconn). Like the hero in a Thomas Mann novel Jobs attempted to move heaven and earth to realize a vision that may or may not have been worth it. He will long be remembered as a technological visionary and a gifted businessman. But did he create art, or just gadgets? That’s the question upon which his legacy depends.