WSJ: Hide the Button:Steve Jobs Has His Finger on It

Apple CEO Never Liked The Doodads, Not Even on His Shirts or Underneath Them. In fact, he's had his nipples surgically removed!

According to the Wall St. Journal, the iPhone is Jobs's attempt to crack a juicy new market for Apple Inc. But it's also part of a decades-long campaign by Jobs against a much broader target: buttons.

The new Apple cellphone famously does without the keypads that adorn its rivals. Instead, it offers a touch-sensing screen for making phone calls and tapping out emails. The resulting look is one of the sparest ever for Apple, a company known for minimalist gadgets. While many technology companies load their products up with buttons, Jobs treats them as blemishes that add complexity to electronics products and hinder their clean aesthetics.

Buttons have long been a hot-button issue for Apple's CEO. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at Apple who joined the company in 1978, says Jobs was adamant that the keyboard for the original Macintosh not include "up," "down," "right" and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens, giving it a sleeker appearance than other personal computers have. Jobs's reasoning, says Mr. Tognazzini: Omitting the cursor keys would force independent software developers to create programs that used the Mac's mouse -- a novel technology at the time.

"He wanted the thing to look nonintimidating," Mr. Tognazzini says.

Mr. Tognazzini says the strategy worked, but he adds that many users still craved cursor keys and other buttons missing from the original Mac. Just days after Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985, Mr. Tognazzini proposed a new keyboard that ended up nearly doubling the key count of the original Mac keyboard, earning it the code-name USS Enterprise for its girth. Customers snapped it up when it went on sale in 1987.

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