Steve Jobs wore a $100 Seiko digital watch whose rectangle, big numbers, and simple buttons became a blueprint for Apple’s minimalist design

Steve Jobs with his Seiko digital watch
Long before the Apple Watch, a rare 1981 photo from “Make Something Wonderful,” a posthumous collection of Steve Jobs’ words published over a decade after his passing, shows Jobs wearing a Seiko D031-4000 “Dot Matrix” watch. This sleek, rectangular digital watch with a groundbreaking dot-matrix display reflects the design philosophy Jobs later infused into Apple’s core.
Sayan Chakravarty for LuxuryLaunches:
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The D031 was Seiko’s first watch to feature a dot-matrix LCD. Released around 1980, it offered a handful of straightforward functions: time, day, date, alarm, and a backlight. In Japan it retailed for about ¥25,000 to ¥30,000 at launch (roughly $110 to $150 in 1981). Some versions even allowed multilingual day displays. Most distinctive was its animated right-to-left sweep that appeared on the hour. Unlike the calculator watches and feature-cluttered novelties of the time, the D031 was built with focus and clarity, leaving out gimmicks in favor of a cleaner experience…
Jobs had long credited Zen aesthetics and Japanese minimalism with shaping his approach to design. The Seiko D031 mirrored that sensibility — an unfussy, mass-market watch designed to do a few things well, rather than many things poorly. The plain case and practical strap fit neatly into Jobs’s larger vision that tools should be elegant by virtue of their clarity, not by decorative excess…
In choosing this watch, Jobs revealed that even in the early 1980s, he was drawn to objects that placed clarity, discipline, and human-centered design above all else.

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MacDailyNews Take: As Steve said, “”Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

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