5 Feet of Fury

Truth and beauty: Steve Jobs as Keats

Just one more. (One of the best. Please RTWT):

Steve Jobs made computers and music players and telephones and tablets. But what he really sold were two things—beauty and truth. As Apple’s core brand values, they were inseparable. His products looked better, and, he firmly believed, they were better. By being more beautiful, inside and out, they would improve your life. By being better than rival products, they would improve the world and move the culture forward. In this sense, good taste wasn’t a luxury, Jobs felt. It was a moral choice, particularly for the marketers who would shape technology’s future. If you sold an inferior product, you were a liar (if you were successful at it, a tyrant). If you bought it, you were a sucker.

Jobs’s merging of aesthetics and ethics, and his combative obsession with good and evil, would inform all of the company’s marketing on his watch.

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PS: I’ve been hearing lots of bitching about how “locked down” Apple products are. Not true. When it got too slow, I easily unscrewed the back of my (previous) iMac and put in more RAM or whatever you call that green and gold thing.