Steve Jobs saw license plates the way he saw buttons—unnecessary clutterOf all the design crimes Steve Jobs refused to commit, slapping a license plate onto a Porsche ranked surprisingly high. Buttons were bad, styluses were worse—but that clunky metal rectangle? Unthinkable.
California law gave new car owners a six-month grace period before plates became mandatory. But Steve being himself, saw not a rule but an opportunity. From then on, every six months he’d swap his silver Porsche 911 for a new one—same model, same colour, same defiant lack of license plates. While the rest of the world scrambles to renew their registration, he was busy reinventing the minimalist lifestyle one lease at a time.
It wasn’t about showing off. Jobs wasn’t your gold-rimmed Bentley kind of billionaire. He was a purist. The Porsche’s clean design sort of matched his own obsession with simplicity. The same impulse that birthed the iPhone’s single button and the Mac’s sleek silhouette. The man who banned numbered parking spots at Apple HQ clearly wasn’t going to let a government plate spoil his aesthetic harmony.
Some say this habit was almost ridiculous. Others call it genius-level commitment to an idea. Either way, every few months a dealer in Palo Alto knew to expect a trade-in—one immaculate Porsche, six months old, with a faint whiff of obsession and probably an early-morning espresso spill somewhere on the upholstery.
Those cars, by the way, didn’t just get resold—they became Silicon Valley relics. Owning one was like owning a fragment of Apple mythology: “This was Jobs’ car,” whispered with the same reverence as an original Macintosh.
It’s the kind of story that sums up the man perfectly. He was half a visionary, and half a stubborn aesthete. But, say what you will about Steve Jobs, he drove exactly the way he lived: fast, precise, and unapologetically plate-less.
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