In a video from 1983, which has not been released until now, Steve Jobs talks about the expansion of the presence of personal computers in people’s lives.
Former Apple design chief Jony Ive has shared an unreleased video of Steve Jobs predicting the future at the International Design Conference in 1983, a year before the Macintosh was unveiled.
The Apple co-founder’s 55-minute speech shows Steve predicting that personal computers would one day outsell cars, something Ive says seemed “ridiculous” at the time.
The video has been added to the Steve Jobs Archive website, and Ive wrote an introduction to it.
Steve rarely attended design conferences. This was 1983, before the Mac came out, and it was still the early days of Apple. I am amazed at the depth of his understanding of the dramatic changes that were about to occur with widespread access to computers. Beyond prophecy, however, he was instrumental in defining the products that changed our culture and our lives forever […] In this speech, Steve predicts that by 1986, personal computer sales will surpass automobile sales, and within ten years People spend more time with computers than cars. These claims were ridiculous for the early 1980s. Describing the inevitability of this new all-encompassing category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He wants them to start thinking about the design of these products, because whether they’re designed well or badly, they’ll still be made […] The revolution that Steve describes happened over 40 years ago; Partly because of his deep commitment to some form of social responsibility. He cared beyond any kind of performance requirement. His victory was for beauty, purity and, as he said, caring. He truly believed that by building something useful, empowering, and beautiful, we express our love for humanity.
- Jony Ive
The conference at which the young Jobs spoke was held in Aspen, Colorado, on the theme “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be.” The night before his speech, Steve had given explanations about the Apple Lisa, one of the first commercial computers with a mouse and graphical user interface, which was released in 1983.
Jobs began his speech by explaining why he wore a bow tie. He steps up to the microphone and says, “They gave me sixty dollars, so I wore a bow tie.” He said this, pointing to the striped bow tie he wore with a sport coat and jeans. A smile spread on his face; The audience laughs. He takes off his coat, realizes there is nowhere to put it, and drops it on the floor, where it remains crumpled for the rest of his speech.
