Simplicity Is the Ultimate Sophistication
DENNIS KNEPP
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) has several Apple computers, including the original 1984 Macintosh. These computers are not used by the museum; they are part of the museum’s collection because of their design.
The Macintosh has the look of the modern while other computers from the same time look old. The Macintosh was a huge success and much of that is due to the look of it. Other computers of the time were big clunky boxes while the Macintosh looked like a friendly face. There is a subtle forehead above the screen and the disk slot formed an off-centered smirk. It even smiled at you when you turned it on.
Other computers were intimidating while the Macintosh was inviting. The handle on top asks you to touch it and pick it up. Steve Jobs encouraged his team to design with a principle from Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” (Steve Jobs, pp. 79–80). The Graphic User Interface with a mouse meant that the user didn’t need to know complex computer codes. It was easy to use, like an appliance. The Macintosh bridged the gap between art and technology, it was popular among college students in the humanities, and the huge catalogue of artistic fonts provided an artistic outlet for anyone making a word document. The flier for your high-school club could now be in Comic Sans.
Despite the success of the Macintosh, Jobs left Apple under duress in 1985 and pursued his sophisticated simplicity design aesthetic under his new company: NeXT. He believed that his design philosophy had been stifled in Apple. People disagreed with him. There were shouting arguments. But with NeXT, Jobs would be free to express his design philosophy. There would be no barriers now. Jobs believed that being able to truly express his successful philosophy of simple sophistication would create an even bigger success.
It didn’t happen. The NeXT Cube was a failure. How could this happen? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. The principle of simple sophistication worked so well with the Macintosh design despite the fighting with others at Apple. It would seem that the same principle of simple sophistication would work even better without the fighting in his new company. Jobs thought it would. That’s why he did it, but it didn’t work.
Jobs tried to design the NeXT as a simple cube, but this simple cube design made the NeXT computer so expensive that no humanities college student could ever afford to buy one. The Macintosh made modern art accessible to the masses while the NeXT Cube did not, even though Jobs was using the same design principle of simple sophistication. Why did it work in one but not the other? How is it that freely following his design principle led to its failure?
I believe that an answer can be found with Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). In brief, the failure of the NeXT Cube design is a symptom of the contradictions already found in the Macintosh design. “Simple sophistication” is a contradictory principle. This principle was successfully expressed in the design of the Macintosh while Jobs was stifled by the constraints of working at Macintosh; but the freedom of expression allowed in NeXT meant that the contradictions of his design principle could be fully expressed in the failure of the NeXT. Hegel argues that this kind of problem is found everywhere: positive ideas are later revealed to lead to be their own negation. The positive idea can only be regained by starting again just as Jobs had to start again at Apple for his next success with the iMac. The Mac, NeXT, iMac develop dialectically.
The traditional understanding of Hegel’s dialectical logic is in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. There’s an idea (thesis), and then the opposite of that idea (antithesis), and then the two are brought together into something greater (synthesis). The 2011 biography by Walter Isaacson presents Jobs’s story in three acts: Act I is the success of the Macintosh; Act II is the excesses of the NeXT Cube; and Act III is the culmination in the iMac (p. 219). The traditional version of the Hegelian dialectic would have the Macintosh as thesis, NeXT as antithesis, and iMac as synthesis. But this theory fails because the NeXT is not the opposite of the Macintosh; the NeXT design is more of the Macintosh design. Jobs was able to follow his design philosophy even more with NeXT. The problem here is with the traditional understanding of Hegel’s logic. A better theory is presented by Slavoj Žižek in his 2013 book Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. The original positive idea is contradictory and unstable. The second idea as a negation is a symptom of this contradictory instability. The third idea is actually a starting again for the first idea. To understand why Hegel thinks that contradictions are found everywhere requires some background in Kant.
From Kant to Hegel to Jobs
Hegel is the culmination of a significant era in the history of philosophy—German Idealism—which lasted from the 1787 publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to Hegel’s death from cholera in 1831. German Idealism includes the writings of Fichte, Schelling, and others, but “It all really begins with Kant, with his idea of the transcendental constitution of reality” (Less than Nothing, p. 9). Immanuel Kant (1724–1824) argued in his Critique of Pure Reason that there is the world of appearances and the world of things themselves. We can only have knowledge of the world of appearances—what Kant calls the “phenomenal world.” We can never know reality itself independent of appearances.
Kant was trying to eliminate metaphysical speculation. “Metaphysics” is the study of reality itself. It literally means the study of theory that’s beyond physics. For example: was the universe created at some time or has the universe always existed? This is a question that is “beyond physics” and so metaphysical philosophers think that they can answer this question one way or another just by thinking about it really hard. Kant argued that this is impossible because each side can be proven. A philosopher can prove that the universe was created at some time and can prove that the universe has always existed. Kant called these opposing arguments “antinomies” and declared that metaphysics was impossible because of them. But Hegel took a different lesson and argued that the antinomies of reason are necessary for doing metaphysics. The world itself is full of these tensions and the dialectical unfolding of them is what drives world history. The Hegelian dialectical logic shows how reality itself is driven by these oppositions.
Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs has many examples of startling oppositions starting with the fact that Steve Jobs had two sets of parents. His biological parents were college educated and insisted that their son become college educated. His adoptive parents were not college educated and, in fact, his adoptive father was “a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics” (Steve Jobs, p. 3). So, his parents were both college educated and not college educated. Jobs grew up in Santa Clara Valley of South Bay San Francisco, what we now call “Silicon Valley.” It was an opposition of both agricultural orchards and high-tech industry. It was both peaceful hippies and a front line in the Cold War. A teenage Steve Jobs worked at a communal apple orchard while his friend the twenty-two-year old Steve Wozniak landed at job at Hewlett-Packard designing calculators (iWoz, p. 122).
The name “Apple Computer” is a representation of these oppositions: both high tech and organic; both counterculture and mainstream; both art and technology. Here’s biographer Walter Isaacson:
Apple. It was a smart choice. The word instantly signaled friendliness and simplicity. It managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie. There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American. And the two words together—Apple Computer—provided an amusing disjuncture. (Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 63)
The “Apple” is also evocative of Jobs’s fruitarian diets. Steve Jobs followed ascetic diets of simplicity and restriction and often he ate nothing but fruit. Isaacson relates the following interview with Jobs’s daughter, Lisa:
Even at a young age Lisa began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t know: Things led to their opposites.” (p. 260)
This is a clear statement of Jobs’s belief in creativity driven by opposites and this is visually manifested in the design of the Macintosh.
Macintosh Simplicity
Steve Wozniak is the genius engineer who built the first Apple computer: the first computer with a screen and a keyboard. Wozniak is an introvert and Jobs is an extrovert. They are opposite personalities and yet they were able to overcome this and design our modern world. Steve Wozniak was such an introvert that starting his senior year in high school he would spend hours alone in his bedroom designing computer hardware (iWoz, pp. 54–55). Because he couldn’t afford the chips, he designed simpler versions: “I had a hunch after a year or so that nobody else could do the sorts of design tricks I’d come up with to save parts. I was now designing computers with half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper” (p. 55).
Steve Wozniak eventually built his compact computers: “I mean, we’d actually built a computer from scratch and proved that it was possible—or going to be possible—for people to have computers in a really small space” (pp. 88–89). Previously all computers had switches and lights like a dashboard in a cockpit, like the helm in Star Trek, or like the control panels on the Death Star in Star Wars: all lights, switches, dials, knobs. Steve Wozniak built the first computer with a screen and a keyboard: “Before the Apple I, all computers had hard-to-read front panels and no screens and keyboards. After Apple I, they all did” (p. 158).
The Macintosh with its graphic user interface and mouse is the culmination of their modern user-friendly compact personal computer. Steve Jobs’s design influences include growing up in an Eichler home that is designed to be “simple and clean modernism produced for the masses” (Steve Jobs, p. 125). He drew inspiration from Bauhaus and Zen Buddhism. (See Chapter 10 in this volume.) This simplicity starts with a small footprint, no bigger than a phone book, which forced the engineers to put the screen on top of the computer, making the Macintosh taller and more head-like (p. 128).
Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look friendly. As a result, it evolved to resemble a human face. With the disk drive built in below the screen, the unit was taller and narrower than most computers, suggesting a head. The recess near the base evoked a gentle chin, and Jobs narrowed the strip of plastic at the top so that it avoided the Neanderthal forehead that made the Lisa subtly unattractive. (Steve Jobs, p. 129)
The Macintosh was designed first, and only then did the engineers get the hardware inside. Jobs argued with his design team that the Macintosh should be classic like a Porsche rather than voluptuous like a Ferrari (p. 128). They made numerous plaster models and argued about them at length. Jobs would argue “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes,” and challenged them to make a computer as simple and intuitive as a Cuisinart (pp. 128–29).
The Macintosh also had a handle on top which invited you to pick it up. The handle would probably be used rarely or maybe even only once. But the handle wasn’t really about functionality. The handle was designed to make the Macintosh more friendly. Other computers were intimidating and not something you’d touch unless you had to, but the handle invited you to touch the Macintosh and this made it more personal and friendly.
Here is the best statement of their belief that the Macintosh was art:
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. . . . Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson. (Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 134)
The Macintosh is art. It belongs in MoMa.1 They were right to sign their art. But the contradictions that created it can be found even in Steve Jobs’s signature. Children sign their names with lower case letters. And yet this childish approach is done with a cursive “grand flair” that is beyond any childish signature.
Real artists sign their work.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#mediaviewer/File:Apple_Macintosh_128Kb_naked.jpg>
The company isn’t “Next” it’s “NeXT” and the capital XT shouts: we are designed. The NeXT logo itself is evidence that Jobs is going too far. The logo is on a black cube that looks three dimensional. The top face has the logo and is tilted. A red “N” and a yellow “e” are the first row with a green “X” and a purple “T.” This is a lot in a logo, but then Jobs did pay $100,000 for it. The designer was Paul Rand, the “dean of corporate logos” with “fifty years” of experience.
On the final spread, Rand presented the logo he had chosen. “In its design, color arrangement, and orientation, the logo is a study in contrasts,” his booklet proclaimed. “Tipped at a jaunty angle, it brims with the informality, friendliness, and spontaneity of a Christmas seal and the authority of a rubber stamp.” The word “next” was split into two lines to fill the square face of the cube, with only the “e” in lowercase. That letter stood out, Rand’s booklet explained, to connote “education, excellence . . . e = mc2.” (Steve Jobs, p. 220)
“e” can also mean “excess.” Here are the elements of the Macintosh, such as friendliness, taken too far into their own negation. The NeXT logo tries so hard to be friendly that it is no longer friendly.
The NeXT was envisioned as a high-end academic research tool but the price caused by the designs put it out of range of most academics. Jobs wanted a cube. A simple perfect cube. Jobs insisted that every angle be precisely ninety degrees which made it nearly impossible to manufacture and when they did figure out how to make it with two molds there was a seam left where the two halves came together. A seam is a blemish on this perfect cube and so Jobs insisted that the die caster start again and a more expensive method was invented for the cast and a more expensive sanding machine was purchased to remove the lines (pp. 222–23). Jobs insisted on a matte black finish and this made the imperfections show up even more. The desire to mass produce a simple and sophisticated black cube collapses into itself. Perfection can inspire us but it cannot be obtained. Jobs also took his adopted father’s advice of the importance of the unseen parts to its negation: “He made sure that the screws inside the machine had expensive plating. He even insisted that the matte black finish be coated onto the inside of the cube’s case, even though only repairmen would see it” (p. 223). All of this resulted in delays and expense. The original plan was to release the NeXT Cube computer in spring of 1987 for $3,000 but it was delayed until 1989 and carried the steep price of $6,500. According to the Inflation Calculator on dollartimes.com, that would be $12,571.10 in 2014 dollars.
The Macintosh was simple and sophisticated modern design for the masses but the same aesthetic principles are taken to their own negation in the NeXT so that none of the masses could afford it. It was time to try again.
Second Chance at Apple
Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 as an “interim CEO.” The title “iCEO” is so appropriate given that Jobs oversaw the design of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. The iMac is the visual expression of the dialectic of the Macintosh and the NeXT. It’s both and neither at the same time. The Macintosh is preserved even in the name “iMac”—“Mac” is a clear reference to the name “Macintosh” and a signal of continuity. Furthermore, the iMac design is similar to the Macintosh design in that it is a small computer with a friendly design and a handle that invites your touch. NeXT also is preserved in the name “iMac” by using a lower case vowel in an unconventional location to reference, in this case, the Internet. The NeXT design is preserved in the use of color on the iMac case and a well designed interior that used NeXT hardware. But the iMac is also neither a Macintosh or a NeXT. The iMac was something more. Here’s biographer Isaacson on the design of the iMac:
Once again Jobs had produced an iconic new product, this one a harbinger of a new millennium. It fulfilled the promise of “Think Different.” Instead of beige boxes and monitors with a welter of cables and a bulky setup manual, here was a friendly and spunky appliance, smooth to the touch and as pleasing to the eye as a robin’s egg. You could grab its cute little handle and lift it out of the elegant white box and plug it right into a wall socket. People who had been afraid of computers now wanted one, and they wanted to put it in a room where others could admire and perhaps covet it. “A piece of hardware that blends sci-fi shimmer with the kitsch whimsy of a cocktail umbrella,” Steven Levy wrote in Newsweek. (Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 355)
I love this description of the iMac. It certainly captures my experience as an iMac user. And there are so many new contradictions: both a high-tech appliance and as natural as a robin’s egg; both the virtue of conquering fear and the vice of inspiring coveting; and the Newsweek quotation: “A piece of hardware that blends sci-fi shimmer with the kitsch whimsy of a cocktail umbrella.” Hegel’s radical thesis is that the world itself is contradictory and this can be seen even in design of the iMac.
The first success of the Macintosh led to the negation in the NeXT which led to Jobs’s second career at Apple and success with the iMac. Žižek writes that it is necessary to fail the first time and try again:
The lesson of repetition is rather that our first choice was necessarily the wrong one, and for a very precise reason: the “right choice” is only possible the second time, for only the first choice, in its wrongness, literally creates the conditions for the right choice. The notion that we might have already made the right choice the first time, but just blew the chance by accident, is a retroactive illusion. (Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing, p. 465)
And so here’s the answer to our first question. The principle of sophisticated simplicity in the Macintosh was revealed to be flawed by the negation of the NeXT which made it possible to try again with a new positive design in the iMac.2
1 <www.moma.org/search/collection?query=macintosh+computer>. Thank you to Libby Sullivan, Faculty Librarian at Big Bend Community College, for help with this reference.
2 Thank you to two English instructors from Big Bend Community College: Cara Stoddard for reminding me to read Žižek and John Carpenter for editorial help.
