Steve Jobs’s sons already have their professional careers underway, but there was a time when the Apple co-founder had to put aside his facet as a big-tech executive and tackle that of a family man. And in those moments it was when Jobs could become unrecognizable.
It was told by Nick Bilton, an editor del New York Times almost a decade ago, when the iPad was still a defining device in its first generations. Said editor spoke with Jobs himself on the phone, and in a moment of curiosity he asked the CEO the use that his children gave to the iPad when they had just come out in 2010. The answer? “They haven’t used it”.
“At the blacksmith’s house…”
“We limited the amount of technology kids could use at home,” Jobs told Bilton. That attitude was mirrored by Apple itself, a company that has strictly limited adult content on its platforms. There is no pornography on the App Store, and violent content is heavily measured through age recommendations and features like Screen Time. bullying online was also already a problem at that time. Jobs did not want the dangers of this technology to reach his children, and hence this habit of limiting any access to devices more than is healthy.
Thus, at dinners at Steve Jobs’s house, they talked about “history, books and a variety of topics.” This is what Walter Isaacson was able to verify at one of the dinners in which he participated to write Jobs’s biography, where he saw that his children did not feel the need to look for screens.
And so It’s something that has rubbed off on other top managers.: Former Wired executive Chris Anderson confessed in the same New York Times article that his children accused him of being a “fascist” for exercising the same limits. Blogger founder Evan Williams, with the advent of the iPad, gave them access to a bunch of books so they could read them whenever they wanted. Physical books, on paper. No screens.
To this day Apple continues to apply the same pattern, seeking to protect as much as possible what minors do with your devices. Screen Time has been improving with each version of iOS, and iMessage continues to add measures that seek to protect them from strangers. The benefit: parents tend to consider an iPhone as a minor’s first terminal over another mobile, knowing these protections.
Image | Emily Wade
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