fringes乔布斯小传(中英文对照)

2021年1月20日发(作者：ssnd)
导读：
《经济学人》
上乔布斯生平这篇文章会不会出考研英语阅读题
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转载了这篇文章的中英
文对照版，希望对你有所帮助。


《经济学人》< br>网络版发表评论文章，
对乔布斯的逝世做出了默哀，
并对乔布斯的生平进行了
总 结。
指出乔布斯非凡的成就源于其丰富的经历，
而乔布斯将科学技术与人文科学和人性相
结合是其产品成功的根本所在。


NOBODY
else
in
the
computer
industry,
or
any
other
industry
for
that
matter,
could
put
on
a
show like Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and
conjure up a “magical” or “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the
performances
of
a
master
showman.
All
computers
do
is
fetch
and
shuffle
numbers,
he
once
explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. He spent his life packaging
that magic into elegantly designed, easy to use products.

He had been among the first, back in the 1970s, to see the potential that lay in the idea of selling
computers to ordinary people. In those days of green-on-black displays, when floppy discs were
still floppy, the notion that computers might soon become ubiquitous
seemed fanciful. But Mr
Jobs
was
one
of
a
handful
of
pioneers
who
saw
what
was
coming.
Crucially,
he
also
had
an
unusual knack for looking at computers from the outside, as a user, not just from the inside, as an
engineer
—
something he attributed to the experiences of his wayward youth.

Mr Jobs caught the computing bug while growing up in Silicon Valley. As a teenager in the late
1960s
he
cold-called
his
idol,
Bill
Hewlett,
and
talked
his
way
into
a
summer
job
at
Hewlett-Packard.
But
it
was
only
after
dropping
out
of
college,
travelling
to
India,
becoming
a
Buddhist
and
experimenting
with
psychedelic
drugs
that
Mr
Jobs
returned
to
California
to
co-
found Apple, in his parents’ garage, on April Fools’ Day 1976. “A lot of people in our industry
haven’t had very

diverse experiences,” he once said. “So they don’t have enough dots to connect,
and they end up with very linear solutions.” Bill Gates, he suggested, would be “a broader guy if
he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”.


Dropping
out
of
his
college
course
and
attending
calligraphy
classes
instead
had,
for
example,
given Mr Jobs an apparently useless love of typography. But support for a variety of fonts was to
prove
a
key
feature
of
the
Macintosh,
the
pioneering
mouse-driven,
graphical
computer
that
Apple launched in 1984. With its windows, icons and menus, it was sold as “the computer for the
rest of us”. Having made a fortune from Apple’s initial success, Mr Jobs expected to sell “zillions”
of his new machines. But the Mac was not the mass-market success Mr Jobs had hoped for, and
he was ousted from Apple by its board.

Yet
this
apparently
disastrous
turn
of
events
turned
out
to
be
a
blessing:
“the
best
thing
that
could have ever happened to me”, Mr Jobs later called it. He co
-founded a new firm, Pixar, which
specialised in computer graphics, and NeXT, another computer-maker. His remarkable second act
began in 1996 when Apple, having lost its way, acquired NeXT, and Mr Jobs returned to put its
technology at the heart of a new range of Apple products. And the rest is history: Apple launched
the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and (briefly) became the world’s most valuable listed
company. “I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,”
Mr Jobs said in 2005. When his failing health forced him to step down as Apple’s boss in 2011, he
was hailed as the greatest chief executive in history. Oh, and Pixar, his side project, produced a
string of hugely successful animated movies.

In retrospe
ct, Mr Jobs was a man ahead of his time during his first stint at Apple. Computing’s
early years were dominated by technical types. But his emphasis on design and ease of use gave
him the edge later on. Elegance, simplicity and an understanding of other fields came to matter
in
a
world
in
which
computers
are
fashion
items,
carried
by
everyone,
that
can
do
almost
anything. “Technology alone is not enough,” said Mr Jobs at the end of his speech introducing the
iPad, in January 2010. “It’s technology married w
ith liberal arts, married with humanities, that
yields
the
results
that
make
our
hearts
sing.”
It
was
an
unusual
statement
for
the
head
of
a
technology firm, but it was vintage Steve Jobs.

His
interdisciplinary
approach
was
backed
up
by
an
obsessive
attention
to
detail.
A
carpenter
making a fine chest of drawers will not use plywood on the back, even though nobody will see it,
he said, and he applied the same approach to his products. “For you to sleep well at night, the
aesthetic, the quality, has to be c
arried all the way through.” He insisted that the first Macintosh
should
have
no
internal
cooling
fan,
so
that
it
would
be
silent
—
putting
user
needs
above
engineering convenience. He called an Apple engineer one weekend with an urgent request: the
colour of one letter of an on-screen logo on the iPhone was not quite the right shade of yellow.
He often wrote or rewrote the text of Apple’s advertisements himself.


His on-stage persona as a Zen-like mystic notwithstanding, Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager
with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified. He eschewed market researchers and
focus groups, preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. “A lot
of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to

them,” he said. His judgment
proved uncannily accurate: by the end of his career the hits far outweighed the misses. Mr Jobs
was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a “reality distortion field”, such were
his powers of persuasion. But in the end he changed reality, channelling the magic of computing
into products that reshaped music, telecoms and media. The man who said in his youth that he
wanted to “put a ding in the universe” did just that.