A lot will be written about Steve Jobs and his untimely passing. Hell, a lot has already been written about it.
I will say that it has affected me more than I expected. I was not surprised by the news, though I honestly thought it would be at least a few more months or a year or two before it came. Of course I was hoping it would be a long time from now, but realistically I knew it would be soon.
I won’t engage in hyperbole and compare it to a death in the family, but I will say that it was like an unpleasantly hard punch in the stomach.
I communicated with Steve Jobs three times: first when he returned to Apple, then when there was the kerfuffle over the 8800 on the first generation Mac Pros, and lastly when he announced his retirement. I did not receive replies, nor did I expect any.
My first Mac experience was in 1987 when I had a work-study job managing an entire computer lab of computers,something like 50 Macs and 10 PCs running some god-awful MS-DOS, or maybe PC-DOS. I split my time there and sitting in front of an AMD-3a, logged in to ucscb puttering around with Unix for the first time. Even then, the advantage of the Macs was clear as the PCs gave me far more trouble. Over the years I bought many Macs, and also honed my skills on Unix, but before that I was already using Apple ][‘s and had a//gs at home.
So, I can honestly say that Steve changed my life. Not just once, but many times. I can list the devices that Apple produced that I consider to be game-changing, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.There is something about Apple’s best products that exceeds the sum of their parts.
Take the iPhone. There were plenty of mobile phones before it. I saw my first mobile phone sometime around 1983 or so, and it was one of those huge Motorola bricks with the stubby antenna that weighed about 4 pounds. The only people I knew who had them were Realtors. By the time Apple entered the market, mobile phones were a solved problem. It was a technological field that had been worked on for 25 years, and we had gotten to the point where we had he tMotorola RAZR, which weighed about 4oz instead of 4 pounds, and in addition to making calls it could send text messages and even sort of load webpages. Sort of.
And then Steve Jobs and Apple came in and said, we’re going to change everything, and people thought they were going to fail spectacularly. Even people who might describe themselves as fanboys weren’t so sure about the iPhone. It was bigger than most phones, it didn’t have a keyboard, it had one button, it was made of glass, it was considerably heavier than my RAZR, and the battery on it was only good for about 6-8 hours of hard use where I plugged my RAZR in every 3-4 days.
There were a lot of things ‘wrong’ with the iPhone, but all of those things simply melted away once you had one in your hand for a few minutes.
Here’s the secret about the iPhone that everyone using one knows on some level, it’s not a phone. Oh sure, it makes calls, but it is not a phone, it is your portable computer that also makes calls. My iPhone is my email, my contacts, my datebook and calendar, my conversations with friends, my conversations with strangers, my portable game studio, my portable movie screen, my ebook reader, my stereo, my watch, my alarm clock, anemometer, thermostat, and barometer. It is my newspaper, my home phone, my TV, my cookbook, my maps and GPS. It’s also my camera, my notepad, my record of receipts and business cards. It’s my barcode scanner, my price checker, my shopping list, and my reminders.
It might be simpler to list the things I don’t use the iPhone for, if I could think of any.
How much has Apple changed the world? More than anyone can even begin to measure. How big is the shadow that Steve Jobs has cast over our future? Immense in proportions that would have to put him in the same class as Edison, Tesla, or maybe even Newton.
Hyperbole? Perhaps, but I don’t think so.
When Steve Jobs resigned as Apple CEO I wrote a long email to him. I decided it was way too long and I cut it in half. I decided it was still too long, so I cut it again. Blaise Pascal said, “If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” so I ended up simply with:
Thank you for saving Apple. Thank you for changing the world.
And that’s really all there is, isn’t there? He came back to Apple and rescued a company that was by many accounts, including his, months from bankruptcy, and that was a good thing because it allowed me to combine my two favorite computer systems, the Macintosh and Unix. And he changed the world.
Thanks Steve, I’m going to miss you.
