Steve Jobs's $450 eyeglasses a hot seller following death

Horribly misleading title.

Not Steve Jobs' personal pair(s), the make of his personal pair(s).

Anyone else find this kind of hero worship slightly unhealthy (both with the glasses and turtlenecks)?

Seems to be the antithesis of everything Steve was about..

"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life."

Steve Jobs's glasses ... or Harry Potter's?

I agree. To prevent the copycats from taking over the world, he bought up the global supply of black mock turtlenecks (which subsequently spawned their supply chain management strategy).

I thought they were known as John Lennon glasses, but to be honest, anyone growing up in the UK who needed glasses as a kid in the 60s would be given a pair of these as they were the cheapest available. Back then there were no frameless versions though, to be fair.

I thought Issey Miyake made the turtlenecks for him, and that St. Croix ran a scam promo to capitalize on the Steve's popularity and the publicity surrounding his passing...?

Miyake came up in the bio, here's a link to the article with squirming people caught telling fibs.

Black Book Magazine "St. Croix Did Not Make Steve Jobs' Mock Turtleneck"

Steve was one of the few people who could make those glasses look good. Honestly not everyone can pull off that look.

Really. What good will the Glasses do any one. It won't bring him back.

I totally agree. Be you not Steve.

Nothing unhealthy about it.


Sure, but what's wrong with that? The world needs leaders AND followers.


He was also very fond of the saying "good artists borrow, great artists steal"

Don't fool yourself about what he was. If he wanted everyone to strike out on their own don't you think he'd have more than 1 model of iPhone in two colors?

They will be able to see clearly...

Due to complications with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, Jobs passed away on Oct. 5 at age 56.

Other items consistently found in Jobs' wardrobe have also seen a spike in sales since early October. The $175 mock turtleneck from St. Croix saw an "almost 100% increase in sales" shortly after Jobs died. The company briefly ran a promotion to donate a portion of its sales of the shirts to the American Cancer Society.

During a eulogy in memory of Jobs, Mona Simpson, his biological sister, quipped that he probably owned enough of the shirts for everyone at the memorial service.


Really this whole thing about imitating Jobs is really kinda stupid. What on earth are they trying to achieve? The poor man is dead. Wearing clothes that he wore and wearing his type glasses are not gonna do you any better than if you wore Old Navy clothes. Be original. Be you not Jobs. Only one good thing is coming out of this. Donation to the cancer society. Other than that its just a shirt and they are just glasses. You wont become Steve Jobs!!!!!

So "stealing" the mans style in glasses accomplishes what exactly?

Great artists steal as a means to an end to create a better version of what came before it. Dressing up like your role model isn't. The quote means nothing as it pertains to this conversation.

I can agree that the world does need leaders and followers or it would cease to function, but an unhealthy hero worship by trying to dress up as your role model doesn't really serve that purpose either.

LOL. You don't know your Harry Potter. Steve's eyewear is stylishly frameless.

What are you, everybody's dad? "Take that off! Don't you dare go outside dressed like that, young man!"

Pretty sure I said nothing like that or implying that, but thanks

Really. I thought it was pretty obvious especially considering the price.

Fortunately, I'm a long time glass wearer and turtleneck [black, burgundy, hunter green, etc] owner before I went to work at NeXT so I'm covered. I have upgraded from Levi 501s button fly youth of our early '80s to Carhartts which are more rugged and comfortable.

Who cares??? Move on already AI.

This is going to sound totally elitist, but I always just thought the sort of people who had this sort of creepy thing for stars like Michael Jackson, Elvis or Princes Dianna were relatively stupid...unable to really think for themselves independent of what the man on the TV says to think -- apparently this syndrome even effects people who I thought were smart...It is heartbreaking to see so many people who I thought were independent thinkers follow Jobs this way...

Apple's big thing under Jobs was Think Different...the iRony is that if people that dress like jobs thought different, they would not dress like Jobs...

There is nothing wrong with wearing a particular type of glasses, turtle neck or brand of jeans if that is YOUR style, but to just copy someone else this way outside of Halloween costumes, is really troubling.

They are a nice design. They are shaped like what they are and they don't try and hide how they work. But I don't like the sign, it looks like an official/authorised endorsement when he never did that.

This is easily one of the stupidest stories I have read on AI, ever. (And I read this site daily.)

Hey, maybe Daniel Radcliffe should play Steve Jobs in the biopic!

It is important to get glasses which are appropriate for the shape of the face. My guess is that Steve both had a good design sense and had people to help him.

I also guess that there will be folks who look ghastly in those glasses, but will get them anyway due to some sort of hero worship.

The marketing clearly conflicts with what this guy is saying. Would it be ok for Gap to start selling a black turtle neck, levis and sneakers outfit as a 'tribute' to Mr. Jobs? Or Walmart having a promo on his favourite cereal? These marketing people are scum.

There were obviously unforeseen circumstances but I kind of feel the same about Isaacson. Launching his biography less than 3 weeks after he died the way he did was distasteful. He made out arrogantly like Steve Jobs wasn't really worthy of his authorship and in the book makes him out to be some deluded, reality-distorted cry-baby who treated people really badly. There may have been elements of that in his character but Isaacson seems to revisit this too often in quite a biased manner. It's always the same when someone important dies though, these people crawl out of the woodwork to make their money.

Did you ever see the movie Barton Fink? Remember the studio exec, and how he dressed when the war broke out?

Same thing here. Folks who want to impress people who judge others by their clothing - they wear clothing which impresses those kinds of folks.

Or maybe the spike was just due to people buying them for Halloween costumes instead.

Maybe some people like really well designed products and trust Steve judgement. Maybe that is why they are getting them.

Maybe that is the real Steve Jobs and you are the biased one?
After 40 interviews with the man and talking to hundreds of personal acquaintances, I'm pretty sure he got it pretty close.

A hot seller? The distributor says they sold a few hundred pairs throughout Asia (implied because they're the Asian distributor). That doesn't sound like a big seller to me. I bet my tiny local independent retail optician sells a few hundred pairs of a single style over a few months. And besides, while they weren't the exact same frames, didn't John Lennon wear the same style glasses? Lots of 'hippies' wore glasses that looked like this.

And although I haven't worn them in decades, I was wearing turtlenecks (although many different colors) when Steve was still in junior high school. How he could stand wearing a turtleneck in the warm California climate, I could never understand.

The strange thing about this desire to look like Steve (if it's real, which I don't necessarily believe that it is) is that even when he was healthy, he didn't look very stylish in these outfits. And even if one did find it stylish, I find it strange that someone would only want to emulate his style after his death.

I think this is all hype and not real.

Steve was a big Beatles fan and asked Lennon where he got his glasses, which was the German eyeglass company,

On the flip side of that, though I have never seen one, I would imagine a woman in a Steve Jobs getup could be rather attractive.

Depends on the woman, obviously. Think about it.

Your whole premise is based on that one, bolded word. Yet I see no justification for it. What exactly is unhealthy about a certain pair of eyeglasses bought by someone with disposable income? WHAT?

Not to mention the direct comments from those who knew him all confirm the take from the book. Only hero worshipers who didn't know him seem to think he was all fluffy clouds and kittens.

Ironic isn't? All these dummies saying "steve would want you to think different" when he just copied all the other hippies of his generation with these glasses? No no, Steve was totally unique and different! He'd never want anyone, much less himself, to be part of a trend! God forbid.

Dummies.

I disagree. I don't think Isaacson came across as arrogant or biased at all and he has a good track record with his other historical biographies. In fact, I got the impression that he really liked Steve and felt badly putting the negative stuff in the book, but felt he had to in order to give the full picture of what Steve Jobs was actually like. And I've heard almost every story in the book before, so there is a ring of truth to them. (What I hadn't heard before was the fact that he wasn't close to the daughters he had with his wife.)

Most geniuses turn out not to be very nice people. Picasso treated all of his wives really badly. Thomas Edison was hated by almost everybody. Einstein apparently treated his wife badly and had other character flaws. For all his talk about peace and his personal rage about being abandoned by his own mother (and father), John Lennon pretty much abandoned his son Julian and Cynthia Lennon claims she was physically abused. He was known to start fistfights from time to time, almost coming to blows with Bob Dylan at a club once.

Most "heroes" are actually flawed and complex characters. It's that complexity that makes them interesting. They're not saints. I've always had a theory that people like Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. have mild forms of autism. It's what allows them to focus so strongly on their area of interest and become great at it, but it's also why they don't deal well in social situations and appear to be highly arrogant. People put up with it because of their genius. It also may be why Jobs had a binary approach to the world (at least according to Isaacson) thinking everything (and everybody) was either fantastic or shit. And being a genius himself, Jobs did not suffer fools gladly. There are many people who feel the same way, but they tend to hold back their feelings. According to the book, Jobs apparently never held back his feelings, regardless of who he was dealing with. If Jobs had a major flaw, it wasn't that he demanded perfection (even though Apple products, especially the first versions of them, were far from perfect anyway), it's that he made it personal.

The incidences of Steve's behavior as portrayed in the book didn't surprise me. What did surprise me, if accurately portrayed, was the amount of "curses" that he spewed and how emotional he was. I never pictured Steve crying a lot.

The "reality distortion field" didn't surprise me either (and I've certainly heard about it before) because I've worked for people who managed the same way. I've worked on projects that were disasters for six months and then the CEO comes in and says "we're going to fix this in 48 hours", even though that's impossible. (Although with Steve, he frequently succeeded at driving his people to make it possible.)

In most Fortune 500 companies, Jobs' abuse of his employees would be considered to construe a hostile working environment. Frankly, I wonder how he got away with it. What will be interesting to see now is whether Cook's lower-key approach, which presumably will take the pressure off of people, will help Apple or hurt Apple. Jobs seemed great at pushing people to do their best work, even if there was a lot of pain involved.

Maybe the publisher had something to do with getting the book out early, an amazing feat to jam a hardcover out with last-minute details (up to July so far in the first half of the book, which is where I'm at). It is a great thing to be reading it while all the assessment is going on right now. Something about the zeitgeist fits here.

Where do you find that he "arrogantly" made out that Jobs "wasn't really worthy of his authorship"? I remember only that he wanted to do the book in 20 years when Jobs would give him a fuller picture. That seems legit to me.

There's easily as much emphasis on Jobs's brilliance and on the sources for his philosophy of changing the world through Apple's products. I agree with you, I suppose, that the painful stuff stands out and seems to carry a lot of weight in the story, but I think many people, I don't know about you, are missing the picture Isaacson is painting of the background and context for the amazing worldview that Jobs injected into the technological revolution that was happening in the Valley. I did not know, for example, that Ram Dass's Be Here Now was such an important book to him. Was to others, too, like Dan Ingalls, speech recognition (!) pioneer hooked up with Alan Kay and PARC, probably also to the whole crew around Stewart Brand.

A very unbookish book, that was, about the joy of being immersed in the flow of life, not stuck in the left-brain, print-based linear worldview of the past 500 years in the West. Skipping a few steps here, this is one place where Jobs got his fierce notions of the plugged-in, world-connected, joyous ecosystem he went on to insist on producing with his tools for the mind. I think this is clear throughout the book so far, if you're looking for it. It's a lot of fun for that reason, and worth the pain.

it's not authors who decide publication date, it's publishers

apple seems not to share your distaste for making money out of job's bio, it released it for sale early in the iBookstore and let the profits come rolling in, iKA-CHING!

Well Isaacson isn't without bias (who is?), but he does mention Steve's rude behavior a lot particularly between pages 1 and 571. After a while, it was like, "Ok, I get it. He can be dick sometimes." But there's also an upside to that. Part of being a huge dick is having huge balls. Steve did things us pussies would never attempt, because we pussies don't have balls. A perfect example of his shrewd balls was in how he managed to gain leverage over Disney during the renegotiation of their deal by taking Pixar public so he didn't need them to finance subsequent movies. I don't know how many people will pick up on that, but I was impressed. And I don't think he's a reality distorted cry-baby, even though Isaacson talks about it plenty. He's not a crybaby or deluded when it came to telling Disney execs or competitors where to stick it.

What do you really think the average motivation is for buying these glasses and a sales surge? Just curious..

Someone up thread said it was about an appreciation for the design, but why a sudden surge only after his death when he has been a highly public figure with those glasses for years? The research that goes into finding that specific brand? I don't remember it being mentioned in the book like the turtlenecks were. Slightly more effort involved then just an impulsive purchase on a whim.

I think there is a slightly different mentality then someone going to buy a Michael Jackson CD after a spike in media coverage following his death then the one that drives a spike in the sale of jeweled gloves and red leather jackets for any occasion that isn't Halloween.

You are free to disagree with this assessment as you already have, but I'd put my money if one spoke with these buyers that it has a tinge of slightly unhealthy level of hero worship and a higher then average visceral reaction to his death as a driver for the purchase.

Don't really care either way as long as they aren't spending their spare time hanging outside the guys house, but still an interesting phenomenon and discussion either way.