I was talking to a friend about how I like to write short and to the point; concise. She said a thing that made me think: how if she tried to do that, it took her longer, because she had to think a lot more about it. I replied that I love to do that. Not just think, but to continually apply myself to make things shorter and more effective. I get a singular pleasure from it.

So today, taking a shower, which gives me additional time to think, since I have done it many times before (must be dozens of times by now), I considered this again, and I realized something about it: what I enjoy so much is not exactly the conciseness. It is PRECISION. I just love it when something is very precisely crafted, and nothing is wasted, everything working well and according to the purpose.

And just after that, I realized that this is why I love Apple Computer and their products. The precision. And the beauty. And the simplicity. (A thing does not necessarily gain beauty and simplicity from precision, but it is almost impossible to gain them without it.)

Precision, beauty, and simplicity are things that takes a powerful mind, well applied, to accomplish. Look at the new G5 computer, for example. You may not realize it just looking at it, but the designer Jonathan Ive reveals that the whole cabinet is crafted from one big piece of aluminum. He adds that this was something that was very hard to accomplish while also getting the fit and finish Apple wanted from the box. It was a first in aluminum crafting.

So why do it? Why not compromise on the fit and finish? Or make it from several pieces? Surely the computer would work just as well? It probably would, but it would not be as simple, and precise, and not as beautiful. Jonathan Ive talks about, with the enthusiasm of a genius, how they continually labor to improve the simplicity and effectiveness of the machine. It is not easy to do, by any stretch of the imagination. It is much, much harder to simplify features than to add features and complexity.

This aesthetic and philosophy permeates everything Apple does. For another example, just look at their web site. Recently I was simultaneously looking at Apple's site and a site with a similar tabbed design. And suddenly I was struck at a subtle, but telling difference: the other site had drop-down menus when you put your mouse over the buttons/tabs. This is very popular, and there is a case to be made for using it (much navigation in a small space). So how come Apple does not use it? Because it is not simple and beautiful. It messes up the aesthetic of the page because the drop-down menues are different from the rest of the page. They are not not two-dimensional, and are not part of the page proper, it is a break in concept. So it is not as simple, precise, and beautiful.

Why does all of this matter? Surely a clunky looking Dell with the clunky looking Windoze OS will accomplish exactly the same thing, whatever you are trying to accomplish on a personal computer? Well, yeah. While Mac computers and Mac OS X have many important inventions, I am pretty sure I could do basically everything I do on a Windose machine, if I had to...

I once asked my friend and favorite tech author, David Pogue, about whether he could use a Windows machine if Apple disappeared. He told me: "Yuck. Yeah, I could, but... yuck."

There you have it, in a nutshell. And if you don't think "yuck" is not important, then consider this: if you continually and universally discourage and invalidate beauty, precision, and simplicity, what do you end up getting? I will tell you what: you get the Soviet Union. You get the Stalin culture, you get pervasive and oppressive ugliness and meaninglessness which grinds down and destroys the spirit and kills the joy of life for everybody. You get an empty, grey slave-society, which grinds its wheels in an eternal death-dance for no purpose and no joy.

Precision, simplicity, and beauty are not just part of life, they are the very essence of life. They are part of parcel of the end-all and be-all of life. They are what the spirit IS when the spirit is free.

- Stobblehouse