Steve Jobs was a visionary who could foresee the future of computers till AI. In 1983, at the International Design Conference in Aspen, a 28-year-old Jobs stood in front of a skeptical room of designers and described the next 40 years of computing. The first Macintosh wouldn't ship for another year. The PC era had just started. And Steve knew exactly where it was going.
Everything he described that day exists today — usually in the exact words he used. Here are the clips.
Generative AI
In 1983, Jobs talked about a computer you could ask questions of, one that would act as a knowledgeable assistant — an idea that only became mainstream when ChatGPT launched 39 years later.
App Store
Before there was an App Store, there was this: Jobs explaining that the computer's real power wouldn't be the hardware, but the software — small programs, written by other people, that you'd install on your machine. In 1983, that was a wild idea. Today it's the entire app economy.
MacBooks and Mac minis
"An incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you." In 1983, that was technically impossible — so Jobs described the roadmap instead. The strategy: a $10,000 computer that fits in a bread box, then a $2,500 one in a shoe box, and finally a computer in a book for under a thousand dollars. That's the MacBook Air, mapped out 25 years before it existed.
Maps Street View (Or is it VR?)
And then there's this one — the clip that sounds like science fiction until you realize it's Google Maps. Jobs describes a computer where you walk down the street of a city, looking at the storefronts, without ever leaving your desk. Street View launched in 2007. He said it in 1983.
People call him a visionary. That's not quite right — a visionary imagines things that might exist. Jobs just looked further down the same road we were all already on, and told us exactly what he saw. Now that we've finally reached the place he saw, I can't help wondering: what was further down the road in his mind?