90 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE
of clutter is a design component that Jobs incorporates into his
products and slides. In fact, most everything about his approach
to life is all-out Zen.
In 1982, photographer Diana Walker took a portrait of Jobs
in the living room of his house. The room was huge, with a fire-
place and ceiling-to-floor windows. Jobs sat on a small rug on
a wooden floor. A lamp stood next to Jobs. Behind him were a
record player and several albums, some of which were strewn on
the floor. Now, Jobs could surely have afforded some furniture.
He was, after all, worth more than $100 million when the pho-
tograph was taken. Jobs brings the same minimalist aesthetic to
Apple’s products. “One of the most important parts of Apple’s
design process is simplification,” writes Leander Kahney in Inside
Steve’s Brain.^10
“Jobs,” says Kahney, “is never interested in technology for
technology’s sake. He never loads up on bells and whistles,
cramming features into a product because they’re easy to add.
Just the opposite. Jobs pares back the complexity of his products
until they are as simple and as easy to use as possible.”^11
When Apple first started in the 1970s, the company’s ads had
to stimulate demand for computers among ordinary consumers
who, frankly, didn’t quite see the need for these new devices.
According to Kahney, “The ads were written in simple, easy-
to-understand language with none of the technical jargon that
dominates competitors’ ads, who, after all, were trying to appeal
to a completely different market—hobbyists.”^12 Jobs has kept his
messages simple ever since.
The influential German painter Hans Hofmann once said,
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary
so that the necessary may speak.” By removing clutter—extra-
neous information—from his products and presentations, Jobs
achieves the ultimate goal: ease of use and clarity.Macworld 2008: The Art of Simplicity
To gain a fuller appreciation of Jobs’s simple slide creations, I
have constructed a table of excerpts from his Macworld 2008
keynote presentation. The column on the left in Table 8.1