Jason Snell
On Upgrade
“If there's ever a product that Steve Jobs would have said no to, it was the Apple Watch as it was conceived in 2014 because nobody said no to anything. The Apple Watch was all things to all people.”
Upgrade · October 2026
Snell and Myke Hurley are talking about Apple's habit of answering every new product with an app store. Snell prefaces this by saying he is no fan of "this would never have happened if Steve Jobs were alive" arguments. His theory is that nobody in power would agree to drop someone's pet feature.
Transcript
It was a different part.
It was the path that led to there's an app store for the TV. There's an app store for iMessage. There's an app store for VisionOS. Exactly.
Also, I'll give you a little bit of a hot take here. I love it. Which is: I am not a fan of the this would never happen if Steve Jobs were alive stuff, right? But if there's ever a product that Steve Jobs would have said no to, it was the Apple Watch as it was conceived in 2014 because nobody said no to anything. The Apple Watch was all things to all people. That first, my standard joke about the 2014 Apple Watch launch, which was, by the way, my last day at Macworld, was what doesn't it do?
Yeah.
Because it did everything. It had everything. It didn't do any of them well, but it did everything. And that was a mistake. Like, they couldn't pick, or they refused to pick, or different people, my theory, different people in positions of power couldn't agree on omitting somebody's pet feature. So they put it all in there, including digital touch. And in hindsight, it's like, I mean, in hindsight, we've learned what the Apple Watch is good and bad. It's a self-device that gets messages. It's an iPhone accessory that can run software synced from your iPhone, but probably not very much of it and not too sophisticated. And it syncs back. And you use it for notifications and health and activity. And they might have gotten it wrong back then, but they didn't try to simplify. They just did everything. But I think it shows you Apple got so much success from the App Store that a lot of people in Apple just got real app store brained. Like everything, you know, that people talk about like software brain, how people get this kind of like broken view of the world because they think everything is software and it's not. Apple totally got app store brained, where the solution to everything was an app store. And the future of TV is apps.
It just, it wasn't, it was an app store for iMessage.
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