Not often will millions of people unite to mourn the passing of a businessman, but to many, Steve Jobs was not just a man selling devices but a representation of a computing ideology of simplicity, minimalism and the combination of arts and engineering. Passing away at the early age of 56 due to pancreatic cancer, many Apple fans and critics alike left words of remembrance and sorrow on websites and at the Apple Stores around the world.
Born to a Syrian professor and a Swiss-German American speech pathologist in San Francisco in 1955, Steve was quickly put up for adoption as his maternal grandfather did not approve of his parents’ marriage. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs and moved to Mountain View, where his father taught him rudimentary knowledge about electronics. After his high school classes, he would drop in on lectures at HP, where he was later hired as a summer employee, working alongside future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Steve enrolled in Reed College after high school graduation, and although he dropped out after a semester, he continued to audit classes including a calligraphy course he said was later instrumental in his decision to implement typefaces and proportionally-spaced fonts in the Mac. He slept at friends’ rooms, ate free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple and returned Coke bottles for food money to manage to keep going to his classes.
After college, Steve worked at Atari and took a spiritual trip to India, where he returned as a Buddhist and experimented with LSD, which he considered one of the most important things he had done in his life. In a few years, he cofounded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, and together they sold the Apple I and the Apple II, which became one of the first successful mass-produced computers. Steve brought PepsiCo President John Sculley to Apple as CEO in 1983, and the following year they released the Macintosh, which was the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface. Due to differences between Sculley and Steve, he was fired a year later and went to found NeXT Computer. One of the workstations sold by NeXT was used as the world’s first web server, when CERN’s Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web, which serves as a fundamental component of the Internet today. Apple bought out NeXT, marking Steve’s return to Apple.
Now that he had become CEO of the company he had founded, Steve finally had the ability to properly unleash the vision he had for technology upon the world. Beginning with the colourful iMac, he brought Apple’s product line under control and pushed an emphasis on design. Over the next fourteen years, his leadership brought products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad to the masses, shaking up the music player, smartphone and tablet industries. The iTunes Store, initially designed to push cheap music downloads, grew to encompass potentially anything a user would want to use on a mobile device.
iCloud, Steve’s final big announcement, is the cap on Apple’s computing solution, designed to bring everything together. With iCloud, Apple’s vision for electronics becomes clearer, and in true Steve fashion, it’s clear he and Apple have been working towards this goal for over a decade, yet it only appears clear to us now. While we think we may have seen Apple’s end goal, it is certain that Apple is working for that which we will see in another ten years, something we have not yet come to grasp. That forward thinking vision we come to expect from Apple is a trait inherited from Steve, who always played a few moves ahead of anyone else.
Steve’s most meaningful contribution to the world lies not within the the cold slated-glass of any specific product that Apple makes nor can it be found within the entirely new industries he had helped create. No, his true gift to the world was the much-needed and sublime reminder that art and engineering are in fact philosophical complements to each other. Just as how a poet can communicate to her readers through written language, Steve was able to communicate in the same artful fashion to the common consumer through Apple’s products.
The externally minimalistic design and intuitive user-experience are all factors that help foster a sense of emotional connection between what would otherwise be a cold and distant object with the user. Steve’s ability to convey emotion through a blend of art and engineering helped not in the least to affirm his affinity with the “global citizen” when the world received news of his passing.
In a rare occurrence of events, it would appear that the general population mourned the death of a “celebrity” not for its definition, but for the actual significance and impact that Steve had had on their lives. The recent death of Dennis Ritchie presents an interesting juxtaposition that articulates the importance of what form is to function, what emotion is to material being, and what art is to engineering. Part of this realization lies at the heart of understanding why the creator of C, and by corollary, the founding father of all modern computing paradigms received little to no recognition outside of the engineering community.
The life story of Steve is also a paragon of the essence of which the American Dream is composed of; an embodiment of hope, passion, and perseverance. It is also through this transcendent effect that he was to allowed to be established as the head of the colloquial “Cult of Apple.” Clearly, Steve himself will still be the subject of many newspapers, magazines, and online blogs to come, perhaps with the anticipation that there would one day be a second coming of sorts in the tech industry.
Beauty, as defined to be all that of which protrudes the human soul, is said by Dostoyevsky to be the savior of the world. Steve’s brief time on this planet, through the morals of his life experience and the ideals he advocates, are all within themselves examples of true beauty. He did not, by any stretch of the imagination save the world. But if more people could see beauty in the notion of staying hungry and staying foolish, of being true to themselves, and following their passion, then the world may still have a chance after all.
Leave a Reply