Unreleased video of Steve Jobs predicting the future

Former Apple design chief Jony Ive has shared a never-before-seen video of Steve Jobs predicting the future during his speech at the International Design Conference in 1983, the year before the Macintosh was unveiled.

In this 55-minute talk, Steve predicts that personal computer sales will one day surpass those of cars, which Ive said seemed “absurd” at the time…

The video was added to the Steve Jobs archives, with Ive writing an introduction.

Steve rarely attended design conferences. This was in 1983, before the Mac was launched, and Apple was still in its infancy. I find it astounding how much he understood the radical changes that would occur when the computer became widely available. Of course, beyond his prophetic role, he played a fundamental role in defining products that would change our culture and our lives forever (…)

In his talk, Steve predicted that by 1986, PCs would outsell cars, and that within the next ten years, people would spend more time in front of PCs than in cars. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he saw as the inevitability of this ubiquitous new category, he asked the designers in the audience to help them. He asked them to start thinking about how to design these products, because whether they were well designed or poorly designed, they would still be manufactured (…)

The revolution Steve described more than 40 years ago did, of course, happen, in part because of his deep commitment to a certain kind of civic responsibility. He cared about others, far beyond any functional imperative. His victory was a victory for beauty, for purity, and, as he put it, for caring for others. He truly believed that by creating something useful, inspiring, and beautiful, we were expressing our love for humanity.

The conference took place in Aspen, with the theme The future is not what it used to be. Steve had demonstrated the Lisa the day before his speech.

Jobs began his speech by explaining why he wore a bow tie.

He leans toward the microphone. “They paid me sixty dollars, so I wore a tie,” he says, gesturing to the striped bow tie he’s paired with a sports jacket and jeans. A smile spreads across his face, the audience laughs. He takes off his jacket, realizes there’s nowhere to put it, and lets it fall to the floor, where it remains crumpled for the rest of his speech.

The conference narrative is a great read in its own right, and the video is embedded at the bottom of the page.

Collage of images from Steve Jobs Archive and Maxim Berg on Unsplash by 9to5Mac