More on this 1997 closing WWDC keynote from Steve Jobs, an hour and one minute in, someone asks “what do you think Apple should do with Newton,” and gets a surprise preview of the iPhone:
“I tried a Newton, I bought one of the early ones, I thought it was a piece of junk, I threw it away. I bought one of the Motorola envoys, I thought it was a piece of junk after three months and threw it away. I hear the new ones are a lot better. I haven’t tried one … here’s my problem: My problem is, to me, the high order bit is connectivity. The high order bit is being in touch, connected to a network. That’s why I bought the Envoy: it had a cellular modem in it. And I don’t think the world’s about keeping my life on this little thing and IR-ing it into my computer when I get back to my base station, I think that, to me, what I want is this little thing that I carry around with me that’s got a keyboard on it, because to do email, you need a keyboard. Until you perfect speech recognition, you need a keyboard. You don’t sit there and write stuff, you need a keyboard. And you need to be connected to the net. So if somebody would just make a little thing where you’re connected to the net at all times, and you’ve got a little keyboard, like an eMate with a modem in it. God, I’d love to buy one. But I don’t see one of those out there. And I don’t care what OS it has in it. So, you know, I don’t want a little scribble thing. But that’s just me.”
As to why he didn’t think Apple should run at making that a reality in 1997? That goes back to what Gruber posted this video for in the first place: focus.
“I’m in the minority, and what I think doesn’t really matter about this. I think that most companies can’t be successful with one stack of system software. Rarely can they manage two, and we I believe are going to succeed at managing two in the next several years, with MacOS and Rhapsody, which is a superset of that. I cannot imagine being successful trying to manage three. So I have sort of a law of physics disconnect with trying to do that, I just don’t see how it can be done. And I don’t think that has anything to do with how good or bad Newton is, or whether we should be making $800 products, or $500 products, which I think we should. It has to do with, I don’t see how you manage three software stacks. So that’s what I think.”
Remember, at the time, Jobs is not CEO. Apple has just bought NeXT, and Rhapsody is the codename for repurposing the NeXTStep operating system as Apple’s own next generation OS, which would emerge as Mac OS X some four years later. At the same time, Apple would need to focus on supporting what would come to be called ‘Classic OS’ and, if Newton were continued, spending massive resources supporting NewtonOS. Apple was in trouble in 1997. By killing the Newton, Jobs was able to consolidate programmers, designers, and, importantly, money and general focus to give Apple’s mainstay, the Mac, a fighting chance.
But what about this business of software stacks. Isn’t that the same road they ended up going down with the iPod and iPhone?
With the iPod, yes, but that’s a fairly simple operating system, and, with few exceptions, it’s one that didn’t need to deal with users putting their own data into the system. It didn’t need to run people’s lives. Just their iTunes playlists. iPod’s OS does one thing and does it well.
With the iPhone, Apple chose to share a phenomenal amount of code with the Mac — building on a solid foundation, and then innovating only those elements that were too slow to run on a phone, or user interface elements that don’t make sense for your fingers. But, at its heart, Mac OS X and iPhone/iOS are brothers. This means not only that designers and engineers at Apple need to do less work to maintain it. But it also means that, once you convince a developer they should invest in acquiring the skills to program for iOS, it’s a short hop to convince them to program for the Mac.
It all comes down to two simple tenets: successful products are born from people who want to use them. And, especially in software, time, and, by extension, focus, is the most valuable commodity there is. Allocate it wisely.
