Would Steve Jobs Have Reconsidered Bottled Water?
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Editorial commentary. WaterVO is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Steve Jobs, his estate, or Apple.
Steve Jobs was famously exacting about what went into his products. By most accounts, he was just as exacting about what went into his body. That raises a question we keep coming back to: if he were alive today, knowing what researchers are now finding in bottled water, would he still reach for a plastic bottle?
A man who thought hard about what he consumed
Jobs's eating habits are well documented. In Walter Isaacson's authorized biography, colleagues and family describe a man who cycled through strict regimes for most of his life. As a young man he experimented with fruitarian diets, at times claiming that eating mostly fruit meant he hardly needed to shower, a story former Apple CEO Mike Scott told Isaacson (Entertainment Weekly). He was largely vegan or pescatarian for long stretches, and he fasted, sometimes going two days or longer without eating and breaking the fast with simple greens (Business Insider). He would also eat one food, such as carrots or apples, for weeks on end, then drop it entirely.
Whatever you think of those choices (and many doctors would have plenty to say), they point to someone who took the question "what am I putting into myself?" seriously and acted on the answer.
What about the water?
Here we have to be careful. We could not find a reliable source on what water he drank, so we are not presenting any habit as fact. Like many busy people of his era, he may well have drunk plenty of bottled water. But for this piece, it stays a question, and an interesting one.
When Jobs was alive, bottled water looked like the clean, simple choice. It was sealed, portable, and minimal: exactly the qualities he prized in design. Almost nobody was asking what the bottle itself might be adding.
What researchers see now
In January 2024, a team from Columbia University and Rutgers published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using a new laser-based imaging technique called stimulated Raman scattering microscopy. Testing three popular U.S. bottled water brands, which they did not name, they estimated an average of about 240,000 detectable plastic particles per liter, ranging from roughly 110,000 to 370,000. About 90% of those were nanoplastics, particles smaller than one micrometer. That is 10 to 100 times more than earlier estimates, which mostly counted larger microplastics (PNAS, Qian et al., 2024; Columbia Mailman School of Public Health).
The researchers identified seven common plastics, including PET, the material most water bottles are made of, and polyamide, a nylon often used in water filtration (NIH Research Matters). It is important to be clear about what the study did not do. It measured how many particles were present. It did not measure health effects. Scientists are still working out what nanoplastic exposure means for people, and that research is ongoing.
Would he have reconsidered?
We can't know, and it would be wrong to put words in his mouth. But the question is worth asking, because it's really a question about us. Jobs had a habit of looking at something everyone accepted (the phone keypad, the stylus, the floppy drive) and asking whether it had to be that way. Applying that same eye to a plastic water bottle doesn't take much imagination.
Maybe the most Jobs-like move isn't a specific product choice. Maybe it's the habit of looking again at the defaults in our lives when new information arrives, and deciding on purpose.
Looking again at the default
For some people that means a home filter and a glass or steel bottle. For others it means rethinking where their water comes from altogether. At WaterVO, that's the question we work on. We make systems that produce drinking water from the moisture in the air, as one alternative to single-use plastic bottles. If you're curious, you can learn more at watervo.com. Whatever you choose, the point is to choose on purpose.
About the image: the illustration accompanying this post is AI-generated and illustrative. It is not a photograph of Steve Jobs and does not depict a real event.
Sources: Qian N. et al., "Rapid single-particle chemical imaging of nanoplastics by SRS microscopy," PNAS 121(3), 2024; Columbia Mailman School of Public Health news release, Jan. 2024; NIH Research Matters, Jan. 2024; Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), as excerpted by Entertainment Weekly (Oct. 2011) and Business Insider (2019).