Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

What can I say that hasn’t already been said in the last 24 hours? It’s a very sad day.

The departure from his beloved company, the impending biography, these felt like the actions of a man who knew the clock was ticking faster. Still, when I read the news—on my iPhone, incidentally—I was shocked. Even now, I’m surprised at how strongly the news has affected me. He was a once in a generation talent, an improbable mix of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and John Lennon, all neatly packaged in casual jeans and a black turtleneck. It will be many years before we see his like again, assuming we are very lucky.

Years before I finally bought an iPod, then a Macbook Pro, then an iPhone, and then an iPad, I found him fascinating, as many people do (even the people who claimed to see him for the elaborate dog and pony show he “really” was). I’ve spent many hours, too many really, trying to figure out what made him so compelling. I think it’s that he was the guy who insisted. He insisted that a computer needed to be, indeed should be, both powerful and beautiful. He insisted that there was a better phone waiting to be invented. He insisted that mice were the future, and then he insisted that they were the past. He insisted that details were important, and he made it his job to perfect them. He insisted that technology empowered people, not the other way around.

I can’t claim to have been one of the faithful. I have no stories about growing up on an Apple IIe or a Macintosh. I’m not old enough to have stuck with the company through its dark days, but I am old enough to have watched him bring that company back to life. His products have changed my life. I truly admired him, and I am sad that he is gone. He was only fifty-six. That seems like hardly any time at all, but then again, I suppose that makes his life’s work all the more impressive.

In closing, take fifteen minutes to watch his 2005 Stanford commencement address. If you only have one minute, watch this instead.

Goodbye, Steve. Thank you for changing everything. Thank you for insisting.

I was supposed to do something important and time consuming today, but that turned out not to be the case (not my fault). So to kill time, I thought I’d take a shot at channeling Junk Charts. MacRumors reported today on an analysis from UBS focusing on smartphone brand retention rates. The data are compelling, but the presentation is lacking, if not exactly junky. First, UBS’s chart on brand retention rate:

First of all, if you’re going to print the values of each bar anyway, why are you bothering to make a chart? A table would do just as well. Secondly, that horizontal line representing the mean is redundant; there are only six data points here, so a summary statistic isn’t really necessary. Third, if you absolutely must include a summary statistic, you should choose the median, not the mean. We’re dealing with a very small data set, and one of its values is obviously an outlier. In this case, a simple mean makes for an uninformative summary since it vastly underestimates Apple’s retention number while greatly overestimating the competition’s. The median is a much better choice:

Now we can confidently say that most smartphone manufacturers have around a 30.5% retention rate, except for Apple, which maintains a remarkable 89% of its customers.

The graph of “smartphone switchers” is a more complicated affair:

Grouped bar charts are the Devil, alright? The alternating colors break the visual flow of the data and force the eye to work much harder to follow the story. Readers have to concentrate on colors and distances to pick up trends, rather than having them simply pop out. This data would be easier to follow if it had been split into two separate charts, one for “switching to” and another for “switching from”. Of course, it’s possible to arrange things nicely:

This plot looks a bit fancy, but it’s really just two bar charts laid out horizontally and then arranged next to each other. I’ve also made an effort to be a little more descriptive. Rather than “switching from” and “switching to,” I’ve opted to call these categories “leaving” and “joining”. Color acts as a secondary cue: no one needs to be told that green is good and red is bad. In this configuration, trends in the smartphone landscape jump right out at the reader. People are still switching to the iPhone in droves, seemingly at the expense of RIMM and Nokia, who by the look of the things are in some serious trouble.

Whew. Feel better? I know I do.