Specs Don't Stick. Stories Do.
Sparkline: “This Computer Is Not For You”
I've been making the case for a while now that storytelling outworks fact-based marketing every time. I put it this way: "When you strip the emotion out of your communications in the name of professionalism or precision, you are not making your message cleaner. You are making it neurologically inert."
Today I read Sam Henri Gold's "This Is Not The Computer For You" and it hit like a lightning strike.
It took me back to my early computing days, when I forced computers and software to do things they were not "supposed" to do. I was frankly too dumb to know better, and too excited about figuring "it" out to care. I remember the adults around me always asking whether I was worried I might break something. The thought never occurred to me.
Sam's piece taps into that human desire to learn, to experiment, to feed the part of you that is always on an adventure. It's a story about how specs and facts don't mean a thing when you're obsessed with trying to do something. Technically it's a story about how the new MacBook Neo is both a "terrible computer" and the most interesting computer Apple has made in a long time. I agree with Sam: this machine is going to change the world, because everyone who wants to learn, try new things, and push something until it breaks is going to love it.
And Sam tells that story in a way that maps perfectly onto what Nancy Duarte calls the sparkline in Resonate: the oscillation between "What Is" and "What Could Be." I actually used Duarte's framework to diagram the piece, and he nails every beat.
The closing lines are some of the best writing I've read this year:
He knows it's probably not the right tool. It doesn't matter. It never did.
That's not a product review. That's a story about becoming. And that is why it works.