Science & Tech Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is selling a future where the scarcest resource isn’t electricity, it’s attention and human effort. By calling the information age a “revolution of free energy,” he hijacks the moral authority of the industrial era’s great story: cheaper power changed everything. Then he swaps the fuel. The promise isn’t that computers will save watts, it’s that they’ll liberate “intellectual energy” from drudgery. That framing turns a consumer gadget into infrastructure for the mind.

The line about the Macintosh using less power than a 100-watt bulb is a deliberately homespun comparison, a way to domesticate the uncanny. It reassures skeptics: this machine isn’t a hulking mainframe; it belongs on your desk, quietly working like an appliance. Yet the real persuasion is in “it can save you hours a day.” Time, not technology, is the currency. Jobs is always most convincing when he makes computing feel like an amplifier of the self rather than a hobby for specialists.

The subtext is competitive: this is why Apple matters. In the early personal-computing moment, software still felt “crude,” interfaces were clunky, and the broader culture wasn’t sure computers were anything more than expensive toys. Jobs leans into that crudeness to make his optimism sound sober, then stretches the timeline to 10, 20, 50 years to normalize exponential change. It’s a soft form of inevitability: get on board now, because the tools will only get more intimate, more invisible, and more capable of turning thought into output with less friction.