Passing of an Icon

The other night the technology world was rocked by news that Steve Jobs, famous or infamous depending on your perspective, had passed away.  It seemed sudden- he only resigned from Apple a few weeks ago.  I thought he had at least a year. 

I learned of the news, as many technophiles did, on my iPhone.  Others saw it on their Macs, their iPads, their iTouches.  I am currently listening to my iPhone, wearing those iconic white headphones that seem everywhere these days.

My first personal computer was in college, my senior year.  I bought an IBM 486 from my ex-boyfriend for $400, which seemed a steal for a personal word processor, calculator, spreadsheet maker.  I enjoyed being able to manipulate the file destinations, write programs, explore the new creation of the world wide web.  I even wrote a few HTML websites for Tufts.

I wasn't prepared for how fast things changed. 

I blinked, and everything I understood was evolving at an exponential rate.  If you weren't sprinting, you were falling behind.  And I hate running.

When I was lonely in Charlotte I bought my first Mac - an iPod Touch 2.  It did so many things I expected, and many I didn't expect.  It's a kindle, an internet browser, a movie player, a music player, a game console, an encyclopedia, an email reader... It became what Apple had been promising.  It wasn't just a device.  It was a relationship.  It fed me books and facebook and films while I worked alone in the New South. 

This year I bowed to social pressure and got an android instead of an iPhone, taking the emotional argument of a free society (PC) versus totalitarianism (Mac) to a new (and absurd) level.  Android has taken Apple's idea and improved on it, they said.  You can do more with an android, they said.  Apple operates in a walled garden, they said.  You can't play unless you obey their rules.  So I tried the free society in the form of a Samsung.

I hated it.  It was buggy.  It was sloppy.  It lacked the finesse and intuitive nature of my iTouch.  It tried to thwart me, not help me.  I complained to my computer scientist brother and he said, "well, if you wanted it to 'just work', you would've gotten an iPhone."  So that's what I did.  I traded it in and now have an iPhone 4.  If the iPhone was a cocktail party, the Android is a frat house. 

The attention to how a device reacts to the human condition is what makes Apple products so lovely.  We are human, not machine, and Steve Jobs understood that better than most people in the industry.  Stereotypical engineers take solace in working with creations that obey simple rules they define, not the complex world of human interaction.  WE must change to use THEM.  But rather than force a technology on us that tried to think for us, Steve introduced a technology that worked WITH us.  That celebrated us. 

Yes, he was arrogant.  Yes, his products are expensive and exclusive.  No, we can't do everything in this walled garden, but what we CAN do, we can do WELL.  And in the end, that's what people want. 

I'll be very interested in how Steve's successor handles Apple's products in the future.  The passion of a college dropout who found his identitiy by combining philosophy with machine is gone.  I can't imagine it being the same without him.