The New Yorker: In this article, Malcolm Gladwell makes the case that the late Steve Jobs’s real gift was editing—tweaking details until they were exactly right. He writes, “Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it.”
Citing numerous examples of Jobs taking existing inventions or designs and refining them, Gladwell asserts, “I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.”