Steve Jobs and the 2007 iPhone launch

On 9 January 2007 Steve Jobs spent around two hours on a stage in San Francisco introducing the iPhone. The book analyses the opening three minutes closely, setting the delivery alongside an analysis of what each move is doing.

The sequence is unusually legible: position-taking, a story-opening formulation, a digression that reads as an unguarded moment, repetition, three-part lists, contrast, puzzle-and-solution, headline-and-punchline, and a closing aphorism. Then the reveal — three products that turn out to be one device — lands at a completion point the preceding structure has built.

The chapter's integrative case: every device discussed separately elsewhere turns up at once inside three minutes of stage performance. Proppian structure, defamiliarisation, and a closing line whose premises the audience supplies without noticing it has done so. The book is also candid about the limits of the comparison. Most people are briefing a team on a wet Wednesday.

From Chapter One: Rhetoric

Another point to bring out in Shklovsky’s terms, is that he is making the stone stony. He is taking a very familiar device that has been reduced in people’s minds to a silhouette - keyboard, screen, buttons - and forcing the audience to see it as if for the first time.

Rhetoric · Character

1. Where are the completion points in your own change communication, and what do you expect the audience to do at each?
2. What premise is your closing line relying on people to supply?
3. What could you defamiliarise that your audience has stopped seeing?
4. What role does your audience get to occupy — and is it more than applause?

Chapter One: Rhetoric — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

Status: the passage from the book above is quoted verbatim and checked against the source · surrounding context is site-written · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript