Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. 14 Years. His Presentation was legendary. iPhone was introduced in 2007. 18 years.
The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like. And yet nearly 20 years later No Slides or presentation software, including MS Powerpoint is even at the level of Keynote in 2007.
If there is one thing I learned, is that even if you ask people to copy, making a 100% exact replica in itself is hard enough. Most people cant even copy exact and they ignore the small details. They copy and make things worse much like Microsoft in the 90s and 00s.
And this at the end may come down to taste. Just like Stave Jobs said, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They do not have the craftsmanship or the product genius to make a call on what is a great product or a bad product. Instead a great product is distilled into one that sell or not, by the sales and marketing people, which is the current Apple.
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like.
The underlying difference can not be fixed by software, because software can't make you care about or value things: Jobs saw presentations as performances.
I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I mean that Jobs treated presentations as plays and musicals. Few people are willing (let alone able) to block out days in order to rehearse and fine tune a presentation. Even less so days of multiple people in order to get feedback and suggestions. In real world settings.
Even just rehearsing twice - once to yourself, perhaps in front of a camera to watch back and check timings, and once in front of a spouse or coworker - puts you ahead of 99% of corporate presenters.
And it shows. Even at large events half the presenters appear to have never even seen the deck before and revert to Storytime with CEO as they read the slides to you.
> Even at large events half the presenters appear to have never even seen the deck before
In my experience in academia, most of them wrote the slides just before going up to present
In fact it seems to be almost a badge of honour for the older professors. They pride themselves on giving lazy and unprepared talks. Why? Because it shows that they have earned not having to care anymore, they are powerful enough now that they don't have to perform
Also the slide deck is often dual purpose. Often it's an OK presentation, and an OK document for people who need you to break it into paragraphs and explain each paragraph.
Yes, Tufte hated this, because presentations should be presentations, and people should read the accompanying technical report.
Maybe I should rehearse, spend more money (normally out of my own pocket as I don't have access to a graphics staff), and otherwise prepare more for a conference presentation, which may be 50 people or fewer. But that's probably not realistic. I think I do a decent job in general. I could probably do better. But everything is a tradeoff.
Maybe controversial opinion, I'm not sure most people can learn much useful from Steve Jobs, and trying to emulate his presentations.
He had a huge support team to help him polish, and was very skilled. It feels like someone who has never driven a car trying to learn by watching Formula 1. Yes their drivers are amazing at drivers, but you can't really complain when your delivery drivers can't hit F1 speeds.
If you've been to SaaS product conferences, they are ALL doing the Steve Jobs thing of presenting slide decks that are basically advertisements of new features. All fluff and stock images, very little substance. The implementation details and all their asterisks are provided by your account manager/sales engineer.
Try doing that when presenting a proposal or project results to senior leadership at your company, and see how quickly you get placed into PIP.
Doing a sales pitch to C suite person on your hobby horse is likely to get in as much trouble as doing a technical deep dive into the same topic to the same person.
> The implementation details and all their asterisks are provided by your account manager/sales engineer.
That's because the purpose of the presentation is to get you to talk to your account manager.
Having worked on presentation software, it's more complicated than what it looks like in its surface.
First, considering the base/generic case, you can't really beat Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides, they are somewhat free/included in basic accounts, they will get the job done, people are used to Powerpoint, and it's not the core product of any of these companies, there's very little incentive for them to improve that.
Second, because you can't compete on base case, a company needs to target those who will willingly pay for presentation software, that's sales and marketing, they don't care about beautiful software, they care about conversion and data.
And lastly, most presentations are bland, the more you invest in a great creation and editing experience, the more complicated it gets and makes it less likely that people who just want to create basic presentations actually do it, doesn't matter if you have tutorials or templates, they will make crappy presentations to get the job done, if they try to do add a little touch to it they will likely overuse animations or similar features and make it even crappier.
In the end there are very few people who put effort into creating actual presentation decks, the actual content being presented is far more important or a presentation is often a hurdle to get over with, such as doing internal presentations or presenting your school assignments.
Even in conferences you still get really bad presentations, the better ones are mostly remembered not because of the quality of the slides, but the contents and the skills of the presenter.
It's really too bad nobody has been able to step into the role Steve had for the industry. We lack the ability to effectivly communicate what's new and exciting to people and it's effecting the moral across the board.
Now it's hypemen with teams of engineers pushing their solutions more and more.
I'm not saying Steve didn't contribute to hype, but somehow he made it feel natural and welcome.
There is a niche that is left empty for Jobs' style of presentation.
> We lack the ability to effectivly communicate what's new and exciting to people and it's effecting the moral across the board.
I have a harder time with this.
The last presentation that stuck with me is Framework's 12 inch laptop [0]. It's absolutely not polished, the camera shakes, I don't know if they even rehearsed it or made multiple takes. And they seem to be conscious enough to have publicly asked for video producers to contact them to make better videos.
But that presentation gets to the viewer everything it needs to, it's clear, well explained, succinct, and makes you want to go buy it now if the product is for you.
I don't want the second coming of Steve Jobs with graphs with no Y axis or reality distortion fields. I want companies confident enough that their products can mostly speak for themselves and only need simple and straight explanations.
> It's absolutely not polished, the camera shakes, I don't know if they even rehearsed it or made multiple takes. And they seem to be conscious enough to have publicly asked for video producers to contact them to make better videos.
One of the things that is clear from watching that video (which is great by the way), is that they tell this story day in day out. They know their story, and they know their audience wants to see the detail they're sharing. Posting the M1 Macbook reveal [0] isn't going to turn the head of someone who wants replacable RAM in their laptop, but having someone take it apart on their desk is.
He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times. But. This is exactly the point that so many other companies/brands missed. Serve your usebase, make the product revolutionary with as boring tech as possible.
Yes of course Apple, a fantastically capital-strong enterprise did spend a lot on tech R&D, but they usually did their own non-standard thing. (Vertical integration, the consequence of narrow focus, later the advantage of product/brand differentiation.) Of course, again, all possible due to the wildly successful Mac/MacBooks.
> He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times.
He knew that who did it first didn’t matter as much as the first one to do it right. New technology can’t be revolutionary if the products it’s sold in flop or never escape their tiny niche, no matter how cool it is.
Mac and MacBooks were not wildly successful back then. iPods were, though. I can’t find a graph for 2000s, but Apple desktop and computers started being used more after iPhone came out (and after MacBook Air came out).
They did, I am just disputing the notion that they were “wildly” successful.
iPod and iPhones I would describe as wildly successful. Even AirPods. Even iPads. They were THE device to get in that market segment, and if you looked around lots of people had them. The M processor MacBooks are also wildly successful. But I don’t remember the iMacs being like that in early 2000s.
> He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times.
It was irritating to a specific brand of nerd who valued "doing it first" over "doing it right". They were a fascinating sideshow back then, if not a little irritating themselves. To see someone write this in 2025 is like learning about the Japanese holdouts after World War II.
I still think they are not doing things right. (Their UI continues to look and feel crazy. Hardware is amazing, software is made for a circus show. Just give some simple task that involves Finder, or any settings on any of their device.)
But it was way more snappier than the median Android device, and usually looked more consistent too.
Thats a good observation. Never thought about this but nobody recent comes to mind. These days everything feels pushed on us. Like we are just a role in their agenda of ushering the world into VR experiences for example. Steve had a way of delivering what we were waiting for and truly wanted. That probably helped the presentation of it all
It did help that Steve was alive during the personal computing revolution. He was a big part in shaping it but it was also just a good time to be in his position.
There's not been the same kind of thing for a while. His death came as personal computers had managed their way fully into our pockets.
Now there are new technologies, but nothing I think we all agree is as ubiquitous as the PC. Even AI is hard to sell because unlike the word processor or the portable music device, AI isn't always functional, and so it doesn't feel as much like a complete solution.
Technology is suffering more and more from itself lately, and I really hope a leader will emerge and help us take an honest look at ourselves and what we accept in terms of usability. No more cookie warnings pretending they solve privacy issues, but complete overhauling of contracts and agreements between technology companies and users, just as an example.
It used to be everyone was normal and to become a billionaire you had to sell a product to a bunch of people. Now there are already billionaires, everyone's already indebted to several, and they basically compete with each other for market share.
I am curious what is so different about Keynote? I tried using it once for a few minutes in a computer lab years ago and while I remember some of the ways of doing things were different, I don't remember it being different. I was never that impressed with the quality of Steve Jobs' slides so maybe I'm missing something.
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like
Bullshit. His style of presentation was suited for a very specific kind of communication that Apple marketing is now known for.
Slides are used in a far wider range of settings -- from classrooms to boardrooms -- where the effect of the Apple style would range between ineffective and detrimental.
I'm willing to bet Steve Jobs would have flayed the presenter if they had tried to present some internal technical presentation at Apple in that kind of style.
Let's not elevate form over function. Not all human communication is about tickling the cave brain and getting someone to buy a product.
The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like. And yet nearly 20 years later No Slides or presentation software, including MS Powerpoint is even at the level of Keynote in 2007.
If there is one thing I learned, is that even if you ask people to copy, making a 100% exact replica in itself is hard enough. Most people cant even copy exact and they ignore the small details. They copy and make things worse much like Microsoft in the 90s and 00s.
And this at the end may come down to taste. Just like Stave Jobs said, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They do not have the craftsmanship or the product genius to make a call on what is a great product or a bad product. Instead a great product is distilled into one that sell or not, by the sales and marketing people, which is the current Apple.