87 replies on “Steve Jobs Dead at 56”

  5. Wow. I knew that was coming, but so soon after the Tim Cook announcement is still shocking. Everything that can be said about him as a businessman and his influence on modern technology has already been said. I am genuinely sad.

  6. And before the trolls start (I am sure they will) Jobs, despite his problems, was one of the very few liberal corporate execs that we have in the US.

  9. RIP. Really put to rest the F. Scott Fitzgerald line that there are no second acts in American lives. What a second act he had.

  11. @9, his second act was the NeXT. Not so great. or maybe that was the third. That makes bringing Apple back from the dead the fourth, and the iPod/iPhone/iPad boom the fifth.

    F. Scott was of course completely full of it. American lives are nothing BUT second acts. It’s the rest of the world where you get one shot and you’re gone.

  12. the responses are interesting in juxtaposition to the “we are the 99% threads” – no doubt he was an innovator and no doubt very influential – but he was one of the 1% and quite specifically got Apple out of any philanthropy… not to mention the products, while well designed and clever – we’re mostly mark up that went to rich people on products produced overseas by people who didn’t share much in the final sales price… and whose consumption was driven by some of most virulent strains of “gotta have the latest” consumerism.

    Don’t get me wrong, every death is mournable – but it is interesting how Steve Jobs is thought of as admirable and doesn’t seem subject to the same kind of critical standard as the other members of the “1%” seem to be (appropriately) held to…

  17. My reaction was “holy shit!” too. I guess I should have realized he was close to the end, but somehow his resignation from Apple didn’t clue me in.

  19. Very sad. I cursed him and his goddamn turtlenecks every time I upgraded my phone, but he was a visionary who really did want to make stuff for people to use.

    But, @12, you’re totally right….

  21. Pancreatic cancer has a 4% survival rate (it’s one of the deadliest there is) so it was sort of inevitable.

    But what an amazing character Jobs was! I wonder what Wozniack will have to say about him?

  22. You can get any color iPhone 6 you want, so long as it comes in Steve Jobs Memorial Black.

    …

    What? Too soon?

    I’ve got an Apple II+ with working dual 5.25″ floppies in my garage, even if the floppies melted over the years.

  25. Fair enough, @11 and 15. As someone who’s never followed tech closely I thought only of the broadest sense that he twice was a vanguard figure whom I would have known from Adam: the Lisa era, and then his more recent crescendo of iPods, Macbooks and iPhones.

  26. In memoriam, I will probably re-read Steven Levy’s 1984 book Hackers this weekend and savor his description of the early-computer-revolution Jobs as a shaggy-haired Silicon Valley brat “whose customary garb was jeans and bare feet,” driving to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in an old VW van.

    Much of my life in science was dependent on Apple computers and technology, whose WYSIWYG capabilities and early plug-and-play networking tremendously accelerated our production of scientific manuscripts, including camera-ready tables and graphs.

  28. @25 — ah, the Lisa. I’ve actually seen one of those, though I wasn’t allowed to touch it. I’ve very briefly used a NeXT, though — typed a couple of commands. Apple IIe in community college, original Mac, Mac SE owner.

    Jobs gets too much credit for designing great products — he didn’t design them, Jonathan Ive did — but maybe not enough credit for particularist vision — knowing exactly what he wanted and not accepting anything less than perfection. I think that’s what was so appealing about Macs in general to designers — they were perfect in their way, down to the tiniest detail of the printing on the bottom of the cleverly designed box. There were often other options that were BETTER, maybe, but not as perfect, and perfect is a rare and precious thing in this world of barely-functional crap and garbage. And it is 100% down to Jobs’s nitpicky (some would say fascist) focus.

    I don’t particularly like using Macs as computers but I recognize the source of their appeal, and there have been many times, when I’m struggling with some hopeless piece of shit video driver that has stupidly decided to reinvent the wheel for the thousandth time for no reason, that I haven’t wished it just did it the right way, the same way, every time.

    Whatever else you want to say about him, that was real leadership.

  29. not to be a weirdo conspiracy theorist but … nowhere that ive seen says -when- he died which is weird. did they possibly keep his death under wraps for a few days until the day after they announced their new phone as a way of not murking up their product buzz…?

  33. @29

    In the age of TMZ, that would be nearly impossible unless they sat on a corpse in his home for a while before calling the coroner.

  34. I was at the keynote speech at Macworld SF in 1998 when Steve Jobs announced the first Bondi Blue iMac as one of his infamous “one more things”.

    At the time, I worked for a large mail-order computer retailer that was seeing serious shrinkage of the Mac side of the business. I had (and still do have) an affinity towards the Mac, and was sad to see that possibly go down the tubes. I caught all sorts of crap from the PC guys I worked with, all of them pretty much in agreement that Apple was done for – it was just a matter of time. I was at the point where I was starting to agree with them.

    After that announcement at Macworld my world changed. As soon as I was back to work, the sales staff were fielding phone calls all day long from people demanding to know when we were going to have the new iMac in stock. This was the new Apple – surprise people with a new, never-before-seen product; build demand; make enormous profits.

    Steve Jobs ensured that the division I worked at didn’t disappear. He eventually stopped the notion that being a Mac user was a joke (with most people). Most of all, he made his critics eat their words with a side of crow (Michael Dell and Steve “Fatboy” Ballmer come to mind).

    He was and always shall be a helluva guy.

  35. @29

    When the photo came out of him looking pretty bad about a month ago, remember the iZealots screaming about how it was ‘shopped.

    Reality was he had a disease that is almost always terminal. Sad, but reality. He didn’t have a lot of time left.

  43. I agree with myr (12th post).

    While Steve Jobs was a very smart man, it should be brought to peoples attention that while you mourn this mans passing, you are, at the same time, protesting almost EVERYTHING his company stood for. You can idolize his work, but cant idolize the man as Jobs was an asshole. He was not an approachable person, often a short tempered jerk who you would indeed regret ever working for.

    James Cameron has made some incredibly awesome movies in his life, but I would never want to idolize him or even want to work with him as Mr Cameron himself is a total asshole on and off the set.

  45. I’m flooded with nostalgia right now for the early days of personal computers. Though slightly younger than Jobs, I have some shared history with him and the other pioneers–hogging the Teletype in a high-school utility room that was hooked up to the university mainframe with a 300-baud acoustic-coupler modem; clumsy BASIC programs doing useless things; road trips to the Bay Area for the West Coast Computer Faire; the “magic” of dot-matrix printing; kiting a university mainframe username and password to use the on-campus DECWriters and VT100s while still in high school; soldering up projects in high-school electronics class from the magazines of the era and being awed when the Altair MITS 8800 came along; the Sinclair ZX80; the Osborne and KayPro “portable” computers; CP/M; on and on.

    None of which I followed to their logical conclusions, but all of which gave me a comfort level with the technology of the day–something I no longer have the time or the fire to keep up with.

    Condolences to Jobs’s family, and he had one–their privacy fiercely guarded.

    Also, fuck pancreatic cancer in the most sustained and devastating way possible. I’ve lost too many friends and colleagues to this disease. It would be a lovely legacy if Jobs’s success in life helps conquer it forever, and there’s hope–recently it was found that MRI scans can detect pancreatic cysts (which are cancer precursors) long before symptoms appear. It may well be that, in analogy to finding and removing intestinal polyps, these cysts can be treated in situ, studied to find out what goes wrong to make them cancerous, and/or removed prophylactically.

  46. @43 If you will review history, I think you will find that at that level of executive decision and input, Edison, Ford, Disney, and Bill Gates were no picnic to work with. By your definition, they were and are all assholes. However, they all GOT SHIT DONE.

  47. @12 I wrote Jobs a couple of emails about the sweatshop labor thing, that WE all use when we purchase products made there. Never got or expected a response, but now’s not the time to be lumping him in with the fucking banksters.

    Jobs was in the 1%–but he was truly exceptional. Sure he has a team of engineers, designers (which aren’t held in high regard in other places), and manufacturers but he had a commitment to his own unique vision. He used wabi-sabi as his inspiration–please tell me when the banksters start practicing Zen because they need a little empathy and a realization of interconnectedness. Jobs, for all his numerous human frailties, still deserves respect for *making things that people find useful.* I’d like to know when other human beings beside the 1% find junk CDOs useful.

  48. “@ 43, given your apologist attitude toward UW sports, that’s a highly hypocritical statement. “

    lmao what the hell is this

  50. @43 – while I appreciate the agreement, I thought I was quite gentle and was careful to note those accomplishments he should rightly be remembered for, and made no comment whatsoever on his personality.

    I’m more interested in how the widely expressed notion that consumerism is bad, big profits are bad, sweatshop labor is bad, relentlessly ditching the perfectly functional for the latest iteration is bad – unless it’s related to a product that your tribe happens to think is “good.”

    While it’s possible he was anonymously philanthropic, there doesn’t appear to be much evidence of it -not on a scale commensurate to how fortunate he was. As the widely praised Massachusetts senatorial candidate recently noted, he didn’t do it himself… He most definitely was very wealthy.

    Apple (yes, like most large corporation, but those corporations are criticized for it) most definitely uses cheap overseas labor and has HUGE margins on it’s product – What the market will bear, no doubt, but that doesn’t absolve that fact from criticism – indeed so many of the folks who decry rampant profiteering no doubt use and sing the praises of products bearing some of highest profit margins out there. I find this, which I see as contradictory, interesting.

    Personally, I very much appreciate beautifully designed products that function well – and Apple products quite reliably fit that description. But that doesn’t make the guy who runs the company a saint – and it doesn’t justify a business model predicated on the routine reiteration of expensive high-margin products in order to render them rapidly “obsolete.” The Apple business model is underpinned by the same consumerist culture as all the rest – it just has a better product sitting on top of that.

    My commentary isn’t, for the most part, particularly directed at Jobs at all – rather it’s about the culture surrounding him and the inconsistencies I see in that culture’s attitudes toward other business models/approaches/practices that seem to me essentially identical to the Apple model.

  52. 50: Don’t sweat it. A lot of these Slog enthusiasts identify with people like Steve Jobs and can’t be bothered to consider Jobs’ mixed legacy (which included exploitation and degradation as well as good product design). People identify with their products and the people who design them. And they’re likely to ignore the small details for the big celebratory picture. That’s how powerful visionaries get away with their little excesses. Jobs was a brilliant guy, who will now be deified in death.

  53. Microsoft, under the new law was first to patent dying, while Jobs merely died.

    Thus he cannot legally be dead…unless Apple pays a hefty licensing fee.

  55. @50 You’re preaching to the choir. However, I think it’s just misplaced criticism. Apple is guilty of it, along with most other places. So, yes, it’s cultural. I think what I take issue with is a) you’re comparing Jobs (who makes something) to the banksters (who make nothing) b) why bring this up on the day of the man’s death? I am sure you can read numerous testimonials to his being short-tempered and difficult to work with/for or that the culture in which Jobs flourished is ill. (BTW, I don’t find it hypocritical in the least to participate in culture since one cannot extricate themselves from it entirely.) But your consumerism concern trolling on the day of the guy’s death is probably what got people irked.

  57. I’ll miss the crazy old kook …. But this is a huge loss for the poor, donations will fall to an all time low because of it unless someone who gets his money is as nice as he was. Still, doubt it will remain local.

  58. @53

    It’s worth noting that Apple has become every bit as protectionist, anti-competitive and monopolistic as Redmond has been accused of being. Buy a new iProduct and need a video out. “Well this model has a new miniVGA, DV or Firewire pin configuration. That proprietary dongle will be $30. Oh, have one for your Powerbook. Sorry, that won’t work for your air, $30 please. Have three for your Powerbook, Air and iPod? Sorry, they won’t work with your iPad, $30.”

    “Oh, you have IEEE devices for you Win platform? Here at Apple we call it firewire and claim to have invented it. It’s actually the same as what Sony put out in the mid 90s but our pin cofiguration is different, that will be $40.”

    “I’m sorry. You want to develop an app that works on iOS? Well, we don’t approve of it. NO! Yes, if you try to market it outside the AppStore, we will sue you?”

    “Open source? Puh-lease.”

  59. @55 – by “culture” in my comment, I meant the culture that surrounds Jobs rather than culture as a whole. I didn’t mean to come of piling on him on the day of his death but as I said in my first sentence, what struck me was the juxtaposition in Slog posts – hence the timing.

    As for the difference between bankers and other megabusiness – yes, at least Apple makes something – and I was clear what they make is a cut above – but I don’t think the 99/1- Occupy “movement” is just about bankers – it seems a bit broader than that to me – the banker’s part of the problem but it’s a culture that worships money, things, celebrity, etc. that’s at the root.

    In the end we’re all rats enchanted by one shiny trinket or another (sometimes the trinket is an idea) and we like to praise it and in the glare we lose sight of other things.

  61. 55: Bankers do make things. They generate capital to invest in stuff like Apple–without banks there’s no investment capital; without a stock market there are no Apple shares. Apple and banks are intertwined. They’re two heads of the same snake. Of course, my metaphor makes it sound like all companies should be smashed or something, but I don’t think so. I have no problem with the existence of banks or Apple. But there is a circle of culpability. And both kinds of enterprises need to be reined in.

  62. The man was not a saint, and Apple was, as a company, as implicated as any other tech or manufacturing concern in the exploitation and befouling of China…

    …but facts are facts: if you, a non-programmer, use a computer on a daily basis? (Nevermind a smartphone, or a personal music player, or this little thing called the “world wide web.”) You owe a large part of your ability to do that to one Steven Paul Jobs. Respect.

  64. I’m sorry to read this. None of us escapes death, but I do wish he had kicked cancer to the curb in a different way, though. Fifty six seems an early inning to exit the game. I hope those who loved him are comforted by wonderful memories and that we may see some of his visions that have yet to bear fruit in the future.

  65. Everything that I have done in my professional career has been done on a product that Steve has created. I am frankly stunned at how upset I am by his death.

    My deepest condolences to his family.

  70. That time at NeXT wasn’t exactly wasted. The web was originally developed on NeXT and, if you program a Mac, it’s clear that MacOS X is an updated version of NeXTstep with some MacOS magic dust sprinkled on it. You will likely be typing NS a lot, it stands for NextStep.

  71. for fuck’s sake, there are suicide nets at the factories! I have never been disgusted with stranger readership as I am in reading this set of comments. fuck him, had he donated anything substantial to cancer research maybe he’d be alive.

  73. Fer fuck’s sake… Apple’s products are manufactured in sweat shops in China, and they have a long record of poisoning their workers, using child labor, etc. Plus, Apple is widely known as having ZERO philanthropic giving. They have no foundation, give nothing back to the communities that house them. Jobs himself hardly contributed a DIME to making the world a better place. Compare his record to the incredible generosity of someone like Gates and Microsoft, two entities often listed as “evil.”

    Confusing “they make fun toys” with “they are a force for good” is why we are in this mess.

    I got nothing against Steve Jobs personally, but it is quite ironic how he is being praised as a hero by the same people who have been so publicly angry about consumer culture.

  74. @57 – who’s the crazy kook, again?

    @62 – I’m confident that China (the government, not the people) is responsible for the exploitation and befouling of China (the people, not the government.) Operating – brilliantly- within a worldwide capitalist system, Steve Jobs is now to blame for every abuse of a worker or instance of “befouling” the earth? That idea is hard to swallow.

    While Jobs wasn’t a saint, he was absolutely an innovator, and he will be missed.

  76. @44 given your apologist attitude toward UW sports, that’s a highly hypocritical statement.

    Sorry, but you gotta be a cruel bastard to slam the football program that generates enough money to provide scholarships to hundreds of students every year. Nobody is going to graduate to the pro softball leauge, but someones daughter is going to get a free education for knowing how to kick, throw or catch a ball.

  77. @ 76, what role rape and mayhem play in that?

    I know a lot of athletes who know how to keep the aggression on the field of play. Apparently you only know frenzied goons who can also play sports.

    Admit you’re wrong. Be a grown up for once.

  78. @ 73, funny thing; Gates had a virtually nonexistent record of giving until the late 90s, when the bad publicity from the antitrust case required some good publicity to offset it. Or maybe Melinda made him realize that there was only so much he could do with all that wealth for himself.

  79. @78 – Just to contradict you with actual facts…The Gates Foundation was formed in 1994 with an initial gift of $94 million from Mr. Gates. United States v. Microsoft wasn’t filed until 1998. In other words, Gates was well on his way to becoming the world’s biggest philanthropist well before the antitrust case even started.

    Jobs on the other hand was worth around $8 billion – easily one of the richest men in the country – had no history of substantial personal giving, and was known for doing away with all philanthropic work at Apple.

    So which one of these guys is “evil?”

  80. @ 79, so it was Melinda’s doing? Gates could have been giving away that kind of money for years. (Did the antitrust investigation begin in 1998, or was it years in the making?)

    As for “who’s evil,” just to play along with your silly straw man (how much money do Boeing executives give?), you can ask all the businesses Microsoft ran into the ground.

  81. What in the world are you talking about? Don’t know how Boeing came into this, but they have a remarkable giving record. They give more than $100 million every year for local, national and international education, health and human services, arts, etc. The Boeing Employees Fund – funded entirely by employee contributions – gives another $50 million. Here in Seattle, there’s hardly an arts festival or major environmental project that doesn’t have Boeing money.

    I’m not claiming anyone is more evil than anyone else. I’m just wondering why Jobs is held to such a different standard from every other corporate leader. It seems so obvious that he, and Apple, are just as much a part of the problem as any other multi-billion dollar international corporation. And unlike many, they felt no need to ameliorate guilty consciences by giving back to the communities who helped sustain them. I think it’s reprehensible, and I think Jobs deserves to be called on it.

  82. @ 81, I mentioned Boeing because they’re known to be pretty evil themselves. I well remember how well they supported the arts in Seattle – I remember realizing that a genuine corporate presence was probably the reason why it’s such a great arts city, while my hometown, lacking a large, iconic company, pretty well sucks on that count.

    We’re probably more in agreement than was apparent at the offset – I don’t think anyone’s more evil than anyone else. Big business is amoral at best, and Jobs’ stinginess is certainly a valid thing to point out.

    But Jobs is being praised because he was a bona fide genius. That word used to have meaning before people used it to describe any talented or smart individual – it meant someone who had a revolutionary vision and the wherewithal to make it reality. That should be celebrated. It doesn’t mean Jobs should be deified, but he should be respected for how he changed the world (he truly deserves more credit for that than any other individual, although of course he wasn’t alone), and his passing should be marked because of that.

    His assholishness doesn’t diminish this, or at least it shouldn’t. If you hold everyone you admire to that standard, there would be very few people who make the cut. If that’s your standard anyway, fine. But I worked for Wamu, I know how much giving back Wamu did, and in the end they still ended up doing more damage because of it. Corporate giving really doesn’t mean much to me.

    (Footnote: keep in mind that Apple started the discounted computers for students program in the early 80s, I believe at Jobs’ behest. That’s what the NY Times obit said, anyway. That’s been a hugely beneficial program, and millions have benefited from it. That should count for something.)

  84. Rest in Peace SJ

    I wasn’t aware he was ill until recently, and I wasn’t expecting it would affect me, really, but he was an incredible person. He lead a revolution which made all people (who could afford apple products) more creative and intuitive and less enslaved by technology.

    For me personally, apple creations have saved me time, and increased the ammount I communicate with people I care about. And spared me the fate of becoming more robot-like to fit in with crude PC and mobile phone technology. And it feels like it had only just begun and now he’s gone.

    I realise now how grateful I am for his contribution. I never contemplated that Apple was very much the result of one person, and that all people eventually die.

    This is very sad. I am grateful for his amazing contribution. I really listened to his last speech because he was one of the people who spent their youth expanding their minds, which is why he was able to contribute so much.

    I hope very much that Gens X & Y and all that follow don’t forget the importance of living as Steve Jobs, and so many others of his generation lived in their youths. If we can be more daring, and prioritise expanding our consciousness as he did, then there will still be possibilities for amazing things in the future.

    This man has left an incredible legacy. Let us not take for granted the creations of creative people, because people die.

    The legendary Steve Jobs

  85. In every social movement (e.g. the 60’s tune in drop out period), there will be one or two intellectual genius types.

    Put in a different cultural period (e.g. a conservative, & mean spirited culture), the technical genius types might get caught up in the culture and use them within that context.

    But put a technical genius type into a culture that is idealistic, which encourages doing things differently, and following your heart, and sometimes you get a Steve Jobs.

    What I’m saying here, is that I think Steve Jobs was remarkable, but I’m also saying that all the people who were part of and who helped make the psychadelic flower power peace and love youth revolution also contributed to the legacy of Apple, because without that culture, Steve wouldn’t have become quite the person that he was. San Francisco, Portland Oregon…

    I don’t know if anyone from his era is reading this here on slog, but if you are, then I thank you also for his legacy.

    Sorry for the long rambling posts, but I’m just having a moment of big gratitude for that era and what it produced, now that I know it may die out if we don’t consciously keep it alive.

  86. “In every social movement (e.g. the 60’s tune in drop out period), there will be one or two intellectual genius types. “

    But none exactly like Steve Jobs. Anyone who can illicit the type of response on the internet that he is garnering for his death was a HUGE figure.

    Check out sites like http://www.pixt.com/remembersteve and look at the amazing tributes fans are leaving! Pretty crazy…

  87. “In every social movement (e.g. the 60’s tune in drop out period), there will be one or two intellectual genius types. ”

    But none exactly like Steve Jobs. Anyone who can illicit the type of response on the internet that he is garnering for his death was a HUGE figure. Check out sites like http://www.pixt.com/remembersteve and look at the amazing tributes fans are leaving! Pretty crazy…

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