Although many of these illustrated fantasies are quite beautiful, and some are uncannily realistic, their fatal flaw is often the same. They're larded with features. Apple is about less (those six ports on the MacBook Touch should have been a dead giveaway that this wasn't an Apple product). Even Gecchelin concedes, "This is not the Apple philosophy."
Jobs's primary role at Apple is to turn things down. "He's a filter," says the Mac engineer Hertzfeld. Every day, the CEO is presented with ideas for new products and new features within existing ones. The default answer is no. Every engineer who has gone over a product with him has a story about how quickly Jobs reaches for the DELETE key. "I'm as proud of the products that we have not done as the ones we have done," Jobs told an interviewer in 2004.
Farhad Manjoo, "Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere", Fast Company, 1 July 2010, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/147/apple-nation.html via Rich Goade.
