The Steve Jobs thing is going too far

I freely admit I write provocatively, and sometimes I've even been rude, but this time around, I genuinely do not want to offend anyone. However, the beatification of Steve Jobs is getting so far out of hand that I have to say something.

A blogger for the Economist pushed me over the edge with this:

Prospero: Beautiful gadget, no manual necessary

He put Apple's great achievement better than anyone I've heard, and so I paraphrase it here: it used to be that when you got a computer or a gadget, you had to read a long manual or spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it. One person in the family might take the time to do so, and then spend the rest of the Christmas holiday teaching everyone else how to do the things they wanted to do.

Apple changed all that.

He then goes on to claim that the success of Nintendo's Wii console is due to Apple and Steve Jobs:

The Wii game system has made Nintendo a fortune in recent years. How did Nintendo know it would be a hit? Elderly members of the company's board delighted in picking up the controller and simply moving it around to play the simple, intuitive games. I've never heard someone from Nintendo say they got this from Apple, but the influence is clear enough. These days whether you're a Mac or a PC, an Android or an iPhone, you play by the delightful rules Steve Jobs set for us all.

Okay. Stop.

First of all, the Apple Macintosh was introduced in January 1984. The Nintendo Entertainment System that we grew up with was introduced in Japan in 1983. Remember how with the NES, you had to read a long manual and spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it? You know, until Steve Jobs came along?

Steve Jobs, or anyone else at Apple, did not invent usability, intuitiveness, the graphical user interface, or really much of anything that goes on on your game console, PC or smart phone. Neither did he "revolutionize" any of the above. Obviously he's influenced the entire computer industry, but it's getting a bit too thick to give him credit for everything.

Most of the really innovative things Apple "came up with" for the Macintosh, such as the easy-to-use GUI, were stolen from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. These days, whether you're a PC or a Mac, or anything else, you're operating within a framework invented at PARC. If you don't know that, you have no business blogging about Steve Jobs's or anyone else's impact on the computer industry. Let alone claiming that the Nintendo Wii is influenced by Apple.

In general, it would be nice if more people read, say, this Gawker piece on Steve Jobs. It reminds us, among other things, of the human cost of those nice, shiny devices. Here's a quote from a Daily Mail article from last June's launch of the new iPhone:

Daily Mail: Revealed: Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod

Yet, amid all the fanfare and celebrations this week, there was one sour, niggling note: reports of a spate of suicides at a secretive Chinese complex where Jobs's iPhone, iPod and iPad - Apple's new state-of-the-art slimline computer - are built and assembled.

With 11 workers taking their lives in sinister circumstances, Jobs acted swiftly to quell a potential public relations disaster.

Stressing that he found the deaths 'troubling' and that he was 'all over it', the billionaire brushed aside suggestions that the factory was a sweatshop.

'You go in this place and it's a factory but, my gosh, they've got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools,' he said. 'For a factory, it's pretty nice.'

His definition of 'nice' is questionable and likely to have his American workers in uproar if such conditions were imposed upon them.



For, as Apple's leader was taking a bow on the world stage, the Mail was under cover inside this Chinese complex. And we encountered a strange, disturbing world where new recruits are drilled along military lines, ordered to stand for the company song and kept in barracks like battery hens - all for little more than £20 a week.

In what's been dubbed the 'i-Nightmare factory', the scandal focuses on two sprawling complexes near Shenzhen, two decades ago a small fishing port and now a city of 17 million people.

This is the epicentre of operations for Foxconn, China's biggest exporter, which makes products under licence for Apple using a 420,000-strong workforce in Shenzhen. They have 800,000 workers country-wide.

And as Jobs was speaking in San Francisco, new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally.

Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won't kill themselves.

Yeah. Isn't it funny how when Apple gets exposed for using child labor and sweatshops, the Western left reacts by sipping their lattes while smugly using their iPhones?

I'm not saying people shouldn't mourn, or that instead of eulogizing Jobs we need to vilify him. I'm just asking for some balanced coverage here. He was a man, not a saint. It's testament to the strength of the reality distortion field around Jobs that he's being given posthumous credit for inventing sliced bread, actual innovators like PARC are forgotten, and that inconvenient facts like the horrifying sweatshops that assemble your iPads are brushed under the carpet. Just because someone dies doesn't mean we shouldn't be honest about what he and his company did and didn't do. Eulogies are journalism too.