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There’s a reason why your new iPhone has a virtual keyboard. That reason’s name is Steve Jobs, who has disdained buttons on Apple’s products for years.

You won’t find buttons on the CEO’s trademark turtlenecks, and very few of them on his company’s products. The Wall Street Journal said he sees them as “blemishes” that add complexity and detract from 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 Mr. 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. Mr. 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.

When Apple put a new keyboard, with cursor keys and other buttons, up for sale a couple of years after Apple forced Jobs out of the company, it sold like hotcakes.

Via The Wall Street Journal (subscription req’d)

Posted in Features, Opinion |