Or is he?
The reaction to recent Apple/Steve Jobs activities has all the hallmarks of a family undergoing challenges to its development. This is where a study of Family Therapy has something to offer. Some of the early family therapists were refugees from Freudian therapies, looking for individuals' "troubling" behaviours coming at times when the family was undergoing predictable changes, or developmental tasks, e.g. children first going to school; reaching puberty; beginning to date; going to college, etc.
Many in the Apple sphere think upon the corporation as if they are members of its large extended family. Apple owners tend more than most to have a positive emotional relationship with its technologies, naming hard drives with cute names rather than the boring C or D drive nomenclatures their PC-owning cousins endure.
Indeed, as much as PC-owning friends have traditionally boasted of the flexibility of their hardware systems, it's been Apple owners who have utilised software to individualise their Macs. Shareware developers have assisted in this endeavour for many years, and have led the way in designing high quality software to extend the useability of Mac hardware. Poorly designed software is found out very quickly on the Mac platform, and I would assert there is no shortage of such low quality software on the Windows platform, requiring its users to spend many hours sorting through what's good and what's dross.
Mac users have many means by which to learn about new shareware, and we have engaged in social networking for the purpose of enjoying and extending the use of the Mac way before Tim O'Reilly concocted the term "Web 2.0".
Somewhere along the way, with the introduction of the much hoped-for iPhone, many shareware developers expected their creativity would extend to this new platform. Recall the whoops of delight when, in January 2007 at his Macworld Keynote, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone would run a version of OS X. But in time, this paternal largesse was revealed to be illusory. It was to be Steve Jobs' way or no way at all.
"Dad" turned out to be, for some, a family tyrant, dictating to his teenage children new limitations and expectations: "I know what's best for you, and right now is not a good time to open up the iPhone."
What made matters worse for some in the Apple family was Steve Jobs getting into bed with a new stepmother: AT&T.
Like many children from a newly-formed blended family, we were not privy to what really attracted Dad to his new wife, our new "mother", but we were told it was for the best, and we'd learn to like her in time. The same thing happened when Dad was revealed to have been having a secret affair for years with Intel, but we learnt to live with that, and even rejoice in all the new things the Apple family could do now that Intel was part of the extended family. (My original take on the Apple/Intel alliance, comparing it to professional wrestling, can be found here - well worth the read.)
Meanwhile, certain unhappy adolescents believed they were entitled to do what they liked and ignore Dad's rules, and were dismayed that when he said he was going to ground them for their breaches, he really meant it! Hence, bricked iPhones with others in the family saying "well, you got what you had coming - don't say you weren't warned."
Let's call that old-fashioned sibling rivalry. In truth, both groups (the goody-goodies and the naughty ones, whom we'll call hackers or independent developers) dearly want the approval of Dad, and long for him to take some pride in their endeavours.
Secretly, they'd like nothing more than Dad to take them to his bosom and praise them for how they have contributed to the family, and brought him naches.
The secret unconscious desire for many hackers is for Dad to publicly recognise them, and to offer them jobs within Apple. When Dad doesn't do this, and indeed seems to thwart them, then Oedipal rivalry occurs, a love-hate relationship with Dad, and a desire to harm him. Thus the many writers who now say they won't buy an iPhone or who tell others that Apple is not the same company they knew it to once be, thus revealing a level of "stuckness" most family therapists understand.
That they do themselves no favour by standing on principle and going without doesn't seem to faze them. After all, this period of adolescence is one where young people explore values, morals and self-identity. It is also a time of magical thinking and super-sensitivity to peer group attitudes and behaviours.
Dad, on the other hand, still wants what's best for his family, while keeping his new wife happy in this new blended system. And he wants to keep working on his own projects, secretly off in his garage, tinkering and inventing, occasionally having friends over to enjoy the shared projects (think Jon Ives and his design team).
Personally, having watched Dad in action over many years, I am still of the opinion that he is not foresaking principles for the almighty dollar. He has said so on enough occasions when he's talked about that other family who live in Redmond, and how loads of money seem to never make them happy enough, nor offers them good taste….
If Dad is different than most other dads, it's because he is so future-oriented. He seems never to look at old family albums, and nostalgia is not his game. He is not interested in how his family began, and how he himself was something of a lad when his older brother, Woz, and he went on a bit of rebellious streak, funnily enough fooling around with one of his new wife's close relatives thirty years ago.
While the world of technologies may change rapidly, people and families are slow to change, and we continually play out familiar routines and patterns. Dad shutting out the kids from his tinkering in the garage is same-old, same-old, and when he's ready to show his latest invention, he'll make it easy for the kids to have their say and play with it once he has worked out the bugs.
Until then, all the adolescent champing at the bit, and all the thinking that the kids are owed something by Dad for their loyalty or creativity will amount to nought. I'm guessing Dad is very aware of the kids' whining and carrying on, but he has to take care of his relationship with the new wife first and foremost, while tending to his soon-to-be-finished projects, which will amaze his family when they've complete.
The funny thing is, there are many in his extended family who are currently enjoying his products just as they are, using them just as Dad said they could, and who are revelling in his clever ideas turned into technologies that work.
Dad knows enough about technology after all these years to be aware that technology always leads a double or shadow life. One being the intended purpose, the other being the use of technology to explore solution finding other than the original problem it was designed to solve. This is the world of the individualist hacker, and the world where, if he had the inclinination to look, the domain in which Steve Jobs' relationship with technology began.
The tough task he faces is how and when to let the kids have their way and exploit their own creativity, up against his many years of tinkering and his vision of problems which most have no idea how to solve. But he does.
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