“One
of the greatest inventors of the last century” On October 5, 2011 Steve
Jobs died, and with this epitaph the worldwide media said goodbye.
Three years after his death, we look back on the inventor side of his
legacy, as contentious and controversial as the rest of his personality.
His name appears as the author of 346 patents in the US registry, but
his actual role in all these innovations has been challenged, as he
really had no skills as a designer or engineer. In fact, his official
biographer, Walter Isaacson, describes him as a tweaker: someone who,
rather than invent, was devoted to tweaking and refining
already-invented devices and technologies in order to simplify their
use.
Credits: Marcin Wichary
Macintosh: A great leap in the career of Steve Jobs was the
introduction of the original Macintosh (1984), the first consumer
computer with a graphical user interface. In other words, it had an
operating system with windows and icons, and a mouse to move between
them. This idea did not originate with Steve Jobs. It’s well known how
he was inspired during a visit to the Xerox research centre, where all
these ideas had already been developed. But Jobs managed to pack them
all into a revolutionary computer, adding a few touches of his own.
Credits: Jeremy Keith
Typography on screen: One of the major innovations of the
original Macintosh was that it showed on the screen the font chosen for
the text. Until then, what was drawn on computer screens was just like
on a typewriter. It was on the insistence of Steve Jobs that the first
Mac had the ability to display different fonts. As he explained in his
famous speech at Stanford University, this effort was due to a fleeting
period in college when he was bored and decided to take a course in
calligraphy.
Credits: Christopher W.
Mouse: Steve Jobs was not the inventor of the mouse, but
during his career at the head of Apple, one of his obsessions was to
perfect this device for communicating with computers, though the results
were rather disparate. He first got it right with the simple one-button
mouse for the original Macintosh, much simpler than the mice that he
had discovered on his visit to Xerox PARC. Next, on the launch of the
iMac, he insisted on the idea of a single-button mouse, but with a
circular design that made it much more uncomfortable and confusing to
users. Finally, with his immodest “Mighty Mouse” and “Magic Mouse,” he
corrected the mistake and took his idea even further: Apple mice no
longer have any buttons.
Credits: Marcin Wichary
iMac (1998) + iPod (2001) + iPad (2010): These three devices
fall into the same category. With them, the Californian “tweaker”
proposed reinventing three devices that seemed to him to be stagnant
and/or useless: the personal computer, the MP3 player and the tablet PC.
In all three cases his strategy was the same. He led teams of talented
designers and software engineers and had them invent more and more
prototypes. Then he eliminated the vast majority until he was left with
one that did not upset him and, from that prototype, he had them start
over, once again refining, looking for simplicity and beauty.
Credits: Justin14 / USPTO
iPhone: This same “Jobs method” was the key to developing the
iPhone, perhaps the technological work that definitively exalted the
president of Apple in 2007. Rather than reinventing the smartphone, the
iPhone integrated functions of other mobile devices such as MP3 players,
GPS navigators or even cameras, almost sweeping the market. The key to
integrating all these capabilities into a single terminal was
reinventing the operating system, again putting together pieces that
already existed: icons, touchscreens and gesture control (like using two
fingers to enlarge or reduce a picture on the iPhone, or swiping the
screen to unlock the phone).
After the announcement of the iPhone in January 2007, the competitors
of Apple began working on this same product line, and from there arose
the disagreements of Jobs with executives from Google and Samsung. The
great “tweaker” disliked that others were inspired by his creations.
Thus he started a patent war in which he won a great battle
posthumously: in October 2013, Apple won a patent that gathers together,
in 364 pages, many details of the original iPhone. Apple had just
passed two years from the death of its technological father, and that
macro-patent became known as the “Steve Jobs Patent”.
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