The best Apple advert

I usually cringe when I see Apple adverts on TV. The print or billboard one are alright, usually just showing an attractive product in a stylish setting, but the TV ones with their self obsessive evangelism just put me off. So I think the best advert for any Apple product (aside from this one near work) is Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography.

I've been reading it for the past few weeks after being given it shortly after the man himself passed away and I'm embarrassed to say that I have found myself looking again at Apple stores, Macs and seriously considering buying every one.

I say this as someone who recently switched from an iPhone 4 to a Google Nexus 5 and bought a Nexus 7 tablet on the basis that it was as good as an iPad mini but barely 2/3 of the price. I had an iPod when I was 18 and loved it but my rule of thumb with Apple is that you pay twice as much for a product that is rarely twice as good. Nevertheless, when I next buy a computer, for the first time I might find myself tempted by a Mac.

In the chapter on the iPhone there's a great deal about how it was originally conceived as an iPod that makes phone calls and they originally tried to incorporate the iPod click wheel before giving up and going with touch screen. The click wheel worked for almost everything but they couldn't get past how difficult it was to simply dial a phone number.

But there isn't much talk about apps. This is strange because for me the revolutionary thing about the iPhone was that you could add all sorts of extra functions to your phone via the app store. Phones that could browse the internet or play music has been around for years but the iPhone stood out to me because you could download all these apps to do all sorts of useful, cool, funky things that nobody had ever considered using a phone for before. Your phone was suddenly potentially hundreds of other devices in one.

It's ironic that a company as devoted to the 'closed system' ideal as Apple was largely responsible for the situation we have now where you can add new functions to your phone that the phone's designers never even dreamed of, created by third party developers.

UPDATE 1:

Issacson actually does address the topic of apps when he talks about the launch of the iPad in 2010. Through the iPhone and iPad Apple basically jump-started an entire sub-industry within software development I'd argue that the iPhone had more to do with this initially than the iPad. Although Apple apparently planned the iPad before the iPhone, the phone was the first to come out and when the tablet was released everyone, understandably, said it was just a big iPhone.

UPDATE 2: 

Also if you want more proof that Steve Jobs was kind of an ass, here's the latest update