The blogger Jim Nielsen, writing on his blog on Thursday, picked up an old piece of Apple history — Steve Jobs’s flat rejection of touch screens on Mac laptops — and offered it as an explanation for much of modern technology.
The new MacBooks were the occasion, though Mr. Nielsen said he would not weigh in on them. What caught his attention instead was a widely shared video of Mr. Jobs explaining, after years of user testing at Apple, why the company kept touch off its notebook screens.
We thought about [a touch screen MacBook] years ago. We’ve done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn’t work! Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo. But after a short period of time, you start to fatigue. And after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.
It was one phrase that interested Mr. Nielsen: “It gives great demo.” “Damn, that is a great line for so much of technology,” he wrote.
His point: plenty of products look amazing the moment they are presented, and then, in day-to-day use, turn out to be, as he put it, “kinda terrible.” Demo is everything nowadays, he wrote, because whatever can garner attention gets made. “Because demo time is sale time.”
A demo’s purpose, in Mr. Nielsen’s telling, is to seize your attention and make you aware a product exists. A great product does the opposite: it makes you forget it exists at all. “We’re attracted to what stands out, but we become enamored with what disappears,” he wrote.
And the idea does not stop at gadgets, he said. People can give great demo, too. “You can make a whole career out of just giving great demo.”