Habit forming

Some of the tributes to Steve Jobs mentioned an interview he did over 25 years ago, when he was turning 30 years old. He referred to an old Hindu saying:

"For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you."

Apple designs hardware blended with software that addresses this belief.

After addictive games and email on the Mac, and catchy tunes that can be carried everywhere on an iPod, the most addictive of all Apple devices the iPhone combines an always on connection to the world with an interface that must be touched and caressed to reveal its secrets.

A recent paper entitled "Habits Make Smartphone Use More Pervasive” in the journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing by researchers from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, identified how checking habits that are enforced by informational "rewards" increase usage.

Encouraging this habit formation at an early age (even before parents are willing to fork out for the cost of mobile monthly data plans) is addressed by the iPod Touch (the name is revealing) and of course the iPad.

In Apple's most recent keynote it was claimed that every state in the U.S. is either planning or deploying iPad in schools.

It's not by accident that Apple focuses attention on both students and teachers, with attractive pricing and dedicated iOS Learning Solutions.

The academic jury is still out on whether the formation, and manipulation, of these habits is a good thing but if they're not, they'll still be hard to break.