I occasionally laugh and point at people who talk about threatening to ‘go Galt’ and deprive the rest of us of their productivity and creativity.
One exception I can think of: I’m very glad Steve Jobs never went Galt. That really would have sucked.
It is profound to realize that this is someone who will be invoked hundreds of years from now to illustrate/define this era in history.
You know, that’s cool by me.
Thanks, Steve.
I only own one Apple product, but I would like to thank Steve Jobs for keeping me from committing ’orrible murder. Whenever some muttonhead screams into a cell phone on the commuter train, or a coworker yammers on in a voice like a strangled baby duck, I put on my headphones and crank my iPod up to ear-bleeding levels (I find Ethel Merman and Spike Jones are best for really drowning out voices).
Thank you Steve.
From the first GUI Apple Lisa, through numerous Macintoshes, to my wonderful tangerine clamshell iBook, and on to my Mac Mini and Macbook, and an iPod, thank you Steve for making both my working life and my home life so much more fun. Thank you for making stuff I want to use.
Rip Steve
Not sure what the problem is with my Macbook today but the screen keeps going all blurred.
I just had someone suggest to me that his (imminent at the time) passing might have been the reason for the release of the iPhone 4s instead of the iPhone 5. Is that plausible or was there another reason for it? I don’t really keep up with Apple products so if there was another reason for it (or if that was the reason) I wouldn’t have known it.
One columnist I read regularly suggested that they deliberately didn’t announce the iPhone 5 because he was dying, and that it would be announced in the next week or two, to help the stock recover.
Not that I’m expecting logic in the Westboro Church’s motives — but when that logo was designed back around 1977, there was no cultural association yet between rainbows and the gay pride movement. The rainbow Apple logo was simply meant to show off the fact that their computer could do color graphics, at a time when that wasn’t common.
This silly issue goes back a few years, actually, when there was a kerfuffle over Steve Jobs’ not being immediately forthright about his health problems. There are people around (like An Arky) who believe that Apple shareholders were entitled to know from Day One that Jobs was battling cancer, because of his special importance to the company. Or maybe they believe that every CEO’s health status should be public information. I’m not clear whether there’s a consensus.
In any case, hogwash — I say. But as Mahaloth suggested earlier, this topic should probably go into a separate thread (if it’s going to be dredged up again at all).
Okay, I guess I can understand from a shareholder perspective. I guess I could see people wanting to get out if they thought he wasn’t going to be running it anymore. I’m not sure which side of the issue I fall on, but I can say I understand it now.
I took my first computer class in art school in 1988. We used the original B/W Macintosh to learn about separating colors (except that we were separating grays!). I was also taking a class to learn color separations using rubylith, and I’ll never forget how amazing it was to think you could make that same thing happen on a computer screen.
I’ve used a Mac ever since then- it has been the foundation of my graphic design career and the foundation of my home computing and more recently my music/entertainment (I had to be pulled from my CDs and Blackberry kicking and screaming- I wasn’t an iPod/iPhone joiner:D). Even when I didn’t have a TV, I had a Mac. Crazy to imagine a world without it.
Godspeed, SJ.
I just bought a house 6 weeks ago. The downpayment came from the sale of my Apple stock that I owned since the mid 90’s. Steve’s brilliance and innovation paid for my house.
Jobs owed details of his illness to nobody but his immediate family and the Apple board.
Interesting thing I’ve seen in a couple of the obituaries: because of his role with Pixar, Jobs was the largest single shareholder in Disney.
Yeah, I’m going to pretend I don’t know that.
Yeah, this was shocking and yet not at all surprising. He was an amazing man. I only recently learned of his involvement with Pixar. We used to have an Apple when I was very young. It’s a shame, it really is, but what a legacy!
Nope. Apple was implementing a tick/tock design process where every OTHER phone is a dramatic physical change.
iPhone (1) - new device -Tick
iPhone 3g - new device - Tick
iPhone 3gs - same case, new innards - Tock
iPhone 4 - new device - Tick
iPhone 4s - same case, new innards - Tock
Intel does it too. They have a Major architectural change, then 12-18 months later have an interim improvement, then 12-18 months after THAT another major architectural change.
Well, if they weren’t so obsessed with secrecy, they might have said something earlier to dampen the speculation about the new phone, because everyone was expecting the iPhone 5 to be announced.
I’m not sure it would matter. Name the feature set that would WOW you these days? No matter what they brought out, folks would have been disappointed.
Their secrecy has helped them MUCH more than hurt them…and in the mean-time, the large masses of people that don’t eat-sleep-and-live on rumor will continue to buy them hand-over-fist.
But this really isn’t the thread for that.
Steve Jobs z’'l.
I was a Mac fanboi for several years. I shifted to MS Windows for home use only because I had to – the games I was playing weren’t performing well on Mac OS.
Steve reinvented himself, animation, Apple, and consumer media electronics. The modern smartphone, tablet computer, and portable music player were all due to Steve revolutionizing those respective industries.
Dunno about that. Some of the more moderate sites were predicting a 4s, even getting the name right.
When I get home from vacation, I’m gonna dig my old Quadra 660AV out of the basement and see if it still boots. It’s from the not-Steve era, but it’s the closest to the original 128k Mac that I can get my hands on. Maybe I’ll charge my original click-wheel iPod too, and see what I was listening to when I abandoned it for a newer model.
I worked on contract at Microsoft most of 2010, leaving to join some friends at a startup January of this year. It was the first time I ever had a Windows box as my main workstation. I shoved it into a corner under my desk and brought in my 17" MacBook Pro instead. No one batted an eye. In fact, I’d say a quarter to a third of the laptops I’d see in meetings were some flavor of MacBook.in Redmond, on the main MSFT campus. Pretty amazing. How many people at Apple do you suppose show up at work with a Windows laptop?