In the little bit of free time I give myself each night before going to bed, I’ve slowly been working my way through Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, the autobiography that was hurried to the printers last fall following the Apple co-founder’s death. So far, it’s been an enjoyable insight into Jobs’ origins from a perspective that few others had been granted to date. For one, it’s confirmed that, despite his mass appeal at conferences and other public events, Jobs could absolutely play the asshole to those with whom he was more closely associated. Also, I’m now fairly convinced that in the 1970s, he did, just, like, all the acid. Really, just all of it. A staggering amount. But hey, neither point negates what Jobs contributed to the world, and I’d be dumb to suggest otherwise, sitting here and typing this on my iMac while receiving Facebook notifications on my iPad and checking text messages on my iPhone. So, clearly, no disrespect here, Steve.

In any case, the other night, I was caught up in a passage from the book that described the first genuine attempt by Jobs et al. to streamline Apple as a company. Final preparations were being made for the release of the Apple II, their first all-in-one home computer, and these preparations included a publicity-friendly facelift. Apple’s logo was changed from an old-timey woodcut of Isaac Newton to the bitten apple we all recognize today, and their slogan became a quote often attributed to da Vinci:

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Apple’s appeal comes not from its ability to create new products per se, but rather in taking existing technologies, packaging them in a manner that is intuitively accessible, and redistributing them to the eager masses. They did it with the computer, they did it with the mp3 player, they did it with the phone and tablet, and word is they’ll soon be doing it again with the television. These aren’t coincidences; it takes a certain mastery of one’s craft to make one’s craft look easy. 

And if you think about it, this is true of most things, not just Apple tech. Anyone who’s ever taken a music lesson of any sort knows how grueling it can be to sit and learn notes

and chords

and modes

and keys

and times

and rhythms

and to what end? To be able to take that rigorous, precise training and from it create something that, from an external perspective, appears fluid and organic, as though it came straight from the soul and not via years of honed muscle memory and studied music theory. Charlie Parker could take out his horn and with no more than three notes he could shake you to your core, but you can be damn sure that it was because he studied every which way those three notes fit together in every possible scenario first. 

And as long as I’m rambling about things I know, I might as well mention philosophy, since more often that not, it seems like the only purpose that serves is to overcomplicate the things we take as fundamental. Epistemology is an entire branch of philosophy that tries to explain what it means for us to know something (as opposed to thinking it, believing it, et cetera).

Consider that for a second. Descartes ushered in a new age of thought with his “I think, therefore, I am” schtick by reflecting on what he indisputably knows at the simplest of levels, and epistemologists spend their 9-to-5’s arguing over whether that’s simple enough. And they’re not wrong; think about what goes into me claiming that, say, I know that it’s raining outside. I have to believe that it’s raining outside; if I don’t, I can’t know that it is - that should go without saying. It must be true that it’s raining outside; if it’s sunny out, I don’t know that it’s raining any more than people knew Earth was flat way back in the day. But true belief isn’t enough for knowledge on its own; otherwise, every time I flip a coin, I could say I believe it will land on tails, and that belief would be upgraded to full-out knowledge 50% of the time. Requiring a justified true belief strengthens the definition of knowledge, but then Edmund Gettier comes along to fuck things up just for laughs (presumably). The point is that even the things we consider to be the most basic foundations of our existence get immeasurably more complicated when we look behind the curtain. So it is in philosophy, so it is with music, and so too it is in the root of the juggernaut that is Apple.

So what am I saying? That Apple is a microcosm representative of the universe? That Steve Jobs must therefore be God, and that, ultimately, Nietzsche was right, albeit 130 years too soon? I may be a fanboy, but not quite to that extent. Let’s just say that life can appear deceptively simple, and that Apple has been able to recognize, assimilate, repackage, and resell that to great success…just like they have with everything else.