June 1983. A 28-year-old Steve Jobs walks into a design conference in Aspen, Colorado. He asks the room who owns a personal computer. Nobody raises their hand. He says โUh-oh.โ
Then he spends the next 55 minutes describing the next four decades of technology.
Jobs told the audience Appleโs strategy was to โput an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in 20 minutesโฆ with a radio link in it so you donโt have to hook up to anything.โ Thatโs an iPhone. In 1983. The Mac hadnโt even shipped yet.
He described an MIT project that sent a camera truck down every street in Aspen, photographed every intersection, and built a virtual walkthrough on a computer screen. Google Street View launched 24 years later. He said office networking was about 5 years away and home networking 10 to 15 years out. The web went mainstream in the mid-90s, about 12 years later. Dead on.
He described software being sent electronically over phone lines, with free previews and credit card payment. Thatโs the App Store, 25 years before it launched. He even compared it to the music industry and said software needed โthe equivalent of a radio stationโ for free sampling. Apple built the iTunes Music Store 20 years later.
The AI prediction is the one that hits different now. Near the end, Jobs talked about machines that could capture a personโs โunderlying spiritโ or โway of looking at the world,โ so that after they died, you could ask the machine questions and maybe get answers. He said 50 to 100 years. ChatGPT arrived in about 40.
The weird part is this speech was lost for nearly 30 years. The full hour-long recording only surfaced in 2012 when a blogger got a cassette tape from someone who attended the original conference. The Steve Jobs Archive didnโt release actual video footage until July 2024.
His timelines were consistently too fast. He wanted the โcomputer in a bookโ within the 1980s. Appleโs first attempt was the Macintosh Portable in 1989, which weighed 16 pounds and cost $6,500. The iPad arrived in 2010, 27 years late. He guessed voice recognition was about a decade away. Siri launched in 2011, nearly 30 years later. The vision was right every time. The clock was wrong every time.
Apple was doing about $1 billion a year in revenue when Jobs gave this talk, with under 5,000 employees. Today itโs worth $3.7 trillion.