NOBODY HAS mentioned the earphones. Or at least, when the iPod’s (must not say iconic, must not say iconic, must not say iconic) iconic white earbuds were mentioned in the thousands of articles after Steve Jobs’ death on Wednesday, it was to note their status as stringy embodiments of cool.
But when you carefully, eagerly open the iPod/iPhone’s gift box, and prise out the player, throw the Apple stickers into the drawer with the others, and promise that this time you won’t lose the pin that ejects the Sim card, the earphones are always the runt. It is like buying a Ferrari and attaching a caravan to it.
If you want to feel like you have a small pebble in your ear, these are the earphones for you. If you want half a train carriage to know you were spending your journey skipping through One Direction, then look no further.
You see them everywhere, of course. Apple hasn't just stuck with the things, it has based ad campaigns on them, and managed to make something great out of something that is not. Jobs even included the earphones in one of his famous announcements (you can find it on YouTube), but when you watch him announce that Apple have added a (ta-da!) remote control to the earphones, he comes across like a mid-afternoon presenter on the Shopping Channel, delivering every mediocre detail with the certainty that this really matters.
What happens when he announces the price of their higher-end range? The audience interrupts his flow to applaud, as if he’s told them he’s discovered a portal into his head and everyone’s invited.
Why so much about the earphones? Because they represent an important element in the ratio that greets the Apple buyer.
In the iPhone, iPod and iPad there is balance of desire and design, function and innovation, propelled by Steve Jobs’s brilliance and ego, and topped with a layer of consumer-worship. But there are also disappointment and restriction; smoke and mirrors.
What’s been most notable about the final stages of Steve Jobs’s time in Apple, and in life, was how much the ratio was beginning to shift towards the disappointment. The package still looks beautiful, and the devices come sprinkled in magic, but if you want a phone, there are far better alternatives from HTC and Samsung. You want a tablet? Amazon may have only gone halfway to besting the iPad, but it’s about to do serious damage.
That Jobs didn’t want you to have choice hardly makes him unique as the CEO of a multi-national, but under him Apple’s extraordinary knack for knowing what you wanted came with a serious intent to prevent you from getting what didn’t suit the company.
It has spent a decade walking the consumer down a closed path, effectively trapping buyers into the Apple eco-system. That’s why there is no FM Tuner on an iPhone, no Flash, no removable battery, no extra memory. It’s all about keeping the buyer from wandering into another shop. Jobs was a master at feeding your intuition and the human desire to have magic in their pocket, but he was also a benign tyrant (less of the benign, according to some who worked for him). The self-satisfaction and superiority complex of the Apple worshipper long ago flipped the dynamic around which Apple’s famous 1984-themed adverts were based.
Many of the tributes say that he changed the world. That depends on your criteria. The supposed anti-Jobs, Bill Gates, has put his billions – and encouraged others to put theirs – into third-world aid, a far more meaningful and long-lasting contribution to the world.
To have been key to the personal computer revolution was enough to have earned Jobs immortality, although he was also smart enough to know that those whose names are written largest are those who shout loudest. Jobs helped change the way in which many interact with the world, and how they play within it. He was responsible for countless domestic arguments triggered by people’s addiction to his products.
And Jobs did change a part of the world we recognise, the world in which consumer desire is fully married with self-identity. He didn’t create that, but he elevated it to extraordinary heights.
He changed the part of the world in which the shape of the square in your pocket or the colour of your earphones is a public expression of who you are, and who you are not – and, ultimately, who Apple wants you to be.
Twitter: @shanehegarty
