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Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

"The liberal arts get short shrift in Silicon Valley"

Steve Jobs had something to say about that: "..it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing..."

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I know many on here will discount that as marketing bullshit, but it really is woven throughout their products.

Can you give examples of how Apple products are technology married with the liberal arts and humanities?

I think it's clearly seen in the focus on design details, software flows, abstraction of technical configuration, focus on Music, Art, Media, etc.

Jobs himself liked to use the example of typography. He took a typography course on a lark, and it became a core differentiator in Apple products.

In an age where computers were only capable of printing utilitarian, fixed-width typewriter text, Apple made a computer that could render text in the same way it's published IRL. Jobs specifically cites this during his Stanford commencement speech:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

That was a sales pitch.

And if it was, so? Zuckerberg's identity gaffe was a total PR problem. Apple's Think Different campaign was very much informed by the humanities and liberal arts. To claim that the entirety of Silicon Valley doesn't get the liberal arts as the article claims is flat out wrong, just look at the company with the world's largest market cap.

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