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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyOctober 6th, 2011
Steve Jobs died yesterday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. I learned the news on my iPhone. There is now an outpouring of online tributes for him from everyone, from the geekiest gadgethead to the President of the United States of America.
My first thought in discovering that he died was a surprisingly sharp pang of sadness. We all knew he was dying, but I was surprised to feel my stomach tighten when I read the news. My next thought was to wonder whether I would always remember where I was when I got the news, the way my parents did about Jack Kennedy. After that, my thoughts turned to embarrassment over placing Jobs’s death on such a high plane. After all, what was he to me? He was a multi-billionaire who got a lot of money from me for my iMac, my MacBook, my AirPort, my iPod, and, of course, I already mentioned my iPhone. (No iPad yet, but I hear the Sirens’ song.) He wasn’t much of a philanthropist and he had a reputation for being rather mercurial. And more personally, I had never met him. We never crossed paths, not even remotely. He was, literally, nothing to me.
I think what we feel about Jobs really does come down to what he sold us, a lot of very shiny, expensive, cool things that we convinced ourselves we couldn’t live without. But when you look at all the things he sold us, there is one thread that runs through all of them. He didn’t just sell us shiny crap. He sold us connections. When the first Mac came out you could just connect an AppleWriter printer to it and it worked! That feat was miraculous for those of us struggling with DOS drivers and BIOS settings. After his second coming to Apple from his wanderings in the wilderness, he brought us the iMac. You just pulled it out of the box, plugged it in and you were connected to the world. Then it was the iPod, and after I loaded about half of my music collection onto it, its shuffle feature presented me with connections between the Ramones, Cut Chemist, Duke Ellington, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Hank Williams that I never would have dreamed existed otherwise. What could those connections be, you ask? Some are obvious when you hear them, but others I can’t explain. Maybe the connections are me.
I think maybe that’s really what Steve Jobs brought to the world. Instead of making the computer the center of all of these connections, the center is me. His products made it easy for an introvert like me (yes, really!) to make the most important connections of all, the connections we make to each other. You didn’t have to use his products to make those connections. Email, instant messages, Facebook, and Twitter run on all kinds of devices. But as an engineer, I can tell you that the best technology is always the technology you stop noticing as you go about your daily life. Jobs’s devices did that. They made connecting so easy and and intuitive that the device itself seemed to disappear and you were simply dealing with the person you were connecting with. (Update: So easy that homophobes could use an iPhone to announce they were protesting Jobs’s funeral with no apparent awareness of the irony.)
Jobs brought the world to me, friends and family as well as people who would do me harm. The latter I can do without, but the former are invaluable. It is easier to keep up with everyone wherever I go. Jobs didn’t make those connections possible, but he certainly made them much easier and more ubiquitous, and in doing so he make it easier for us to do stay connected to each other. That, I think, is his greatest accomplishment. He really didn’t make the world better. He just made it easier for us to do it ourselves.
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CPT_Doom
October 6th, 2011
Jobs brought the world to me, friends and family as well as people who would do me harm. The latter I can do without, but the former are invaluable.
I totally understand your sentiment, but by bringing even those we don’t like into that web of connections – and providing technology that made those connections nearly instantaneous – Jobs and his company have also provided us the means to track their hate and counteract it faster and better, leading to a better world.
I am one of those people who do not actually own any Apple products, but I do own several devices that mimick their innovation – e.g., my Blackberry Storm. That may be Jobs’ most lasting legacy – how we interact with technology has changed for good, no matter what specific brands we use. One sign of that was how I heard the news about Jobs’ death, in a Macy’s department store in San Diego, where so many messages came in on other people’s devices that the news spread through the store nearly instantaneously.
Regan DuCasse
October 6th, 2011
I love my iPod Nano, and my iPhone. Thank you S. Jobs…better living through
iGadgetry!
Lightning Baltimore
October 6th, 2011
How long before the wacko contingent claims Jobs died as God’s punishment for removing the Manhattan Declaration from the iPhone app store?
Timothy Kincaid
October 6th, 2011
I joined the iPeople on August 8 when my excuses ran out (iPhone came to Verizon this year).
And, yeah, I wonder what took me so long. A bit of a technophobe, I had been on a phone with Microsoft Phone and had not after three years figured out how to utilize three fourths of its “features”. I currently have over 70 apps (yeah, the excitement will wear off I’m sure).
I now find myself thinking, “…hmmm, Time Warner would let me watch TV on an iPad…”
Susan Jordan
October 6th, 2011
I am hearing on Facebook that he also ignored the fact that Chinese workers in factories producing his product were being poisoned.
Blair Martin
October 6th, 2011
Similar feelings, Jim when I heard (early yesterday morning, Australian Eastern time, sitting at my kitchen table eating breakfast) – a real sadness and immediately I wondered, “Why?” For me it was the realization that back in August when he stepped down from the CEO’s position he must have known his time was “up” and to me that seemed a great sadness. Since then I’ve heard his speech given at a graduation ceremony discussing his cancer and bluntly stating that he knows he is dying, that he will die and that is not a “bad/sad” thing. It opens up more possibilities for life – and that to me is his message, not just the marketing cleverness he exhibited.
Seeing as this is becoming a bit of an AA meeting (Apple-fans Anon) – I’m a very late convert to the Apple world. Rather like the 80s battle of VHS and Beta (I was VHS), so in the mid 90s when I joined the online world, it was PC over Mac, because back then Mac was still expensive and not much ran on them and unless you were dealing with other Macs, it wasn’t that easy to “get along”. I’m still PC based (both at home on the desk and on the road with the laptop), but in the middle of 2009 the iPhone 3GS changed my way of interacting with the world and I was hooked. An iPod Nano came in 2010 when my other mp3 player went belly up and then my phone provider kindly offered my an iPhone4 in November last…(how soon before they lovingly implore me to upgrade to the 4GS?) and like Jim, the Sirens’ call of the iPad is growing because now I can clearly see how it can be useful for my work, having at first been sceptical.
Thanks Steve, take care “up there” beyond the iCloud….
Ray Harwick
October 6th, 2011
Jim, I love your tone and your introversion.
Aside to Lightening Baltimore.
I am a fan of yours because of your presence on Amazon comments. I want to have your children so I’ll have children who are smarter than I. Your skills at argumentation are clearly in the 99 percentile.
I recommend that JIm bring you on board as a writer. Jim does not pay well but he rewards well by being thoughtful.
scooterj
October 6th, 2011
APPLE GEEK COMMENT WARNING. . .
Just curious how we know that he was not much of a philanthropist? He is largely credited with the annonymous $150 million donation to the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center. Who knows what else?
I love the premise of your commentary and I agree that he facilitated our personal connections, but to say he didn’t make the world better, seems to me an under-valuing of the contributions to the arts, to business, and to the perhaps billion-plus people all over the world benefitting from the shiny, expensive cool things he and his teams created.
I think he was a game changer. . . mercurial? Probably, but most billiant people are. As for me, iPad = instant hook-ups and porn. He did make my life better. :)
Timothy Kincaid
October 6th, 2011
I don’t know if Steve Jobs contributed heavily to charities.
But I do remember one Apple contribution which was controversial, which wasn’t necessary for gaining new customers, and ran the risk of driving some away. This contribution – and its attached statement – will forever have my gratitude.
David
October 6th, 2011
Are we really better off for having made “all of this” so easy?
Maybe our brave new online world would be a better if people had to work a little bit, learn a little bit, engage in critical thinking a little bit, to participate.
JohnAGJ
October 7th, 2011
The iPod is one of the best inventions I’ve seen in my lifetime. For that I’m very grateful to Jobs and I’m sorry to see him go. RIP.
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