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.

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