I don’t think anyone else could have said it any better.
And now, a world without Steve Jobs
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
The world is full of visionaries.
We are, as a species, endlessly blessed with numerous beings of every shape, size and nationality who can see entire industries, economies, human conditions, nation-states, biological phenomena, the bend of history and the arc of time itself and then imagine or re-imagine ways they can work differently, more humanely, altogether better.
What’s more, the world is rife with people who’ve made enormous difference via their grand visions, who’ve helped millions, transformed lives, who are largely unsung and who may never receive Nobel prizes or massive media attention, much less seven billion in stock options and a mansion on the hill. These are people who work on some of the most difficult problems of our age — food production, disease, human rights, water, energy, the very survival of the species.
So then. No one can accuse Steve Jobs of being unsung. He was far from unappreciated, had no shortage of ego or wealth or power. And you can say his contributions to the world of technology and media weren’t exactly as essential to the betterment of the species as, say, ending starvation in Somalia, figuring out the triggers for HIV or ending our global dependence on oil.
But then again, maybe they were. Let’s just say it outright, with only a trace of hyperbole: The man nearly singlehandedly made modern tech life worth living, worth having, worth engaging. There’s not a pleasing, beautiful device or elegant GUI alive today that hasn’t been touched by Jobs’ and Apple’s sophisticated design ethos, from cars to homes, staplers to lamps, coffeemakers to vibrators.
The truth is undeniable: Because of Jobs, everything changed. Nay, everything got better. Deny it at your peril.Did Apple/Jobs invent it all from scratch? Of course not. Lumpish, dinosaur-like PCs were around before the breakthrough Apple II. MP3 players existed in some barely usable form before the iPod/iTunes juggernaut made it all make sense. Cell phones were a crapshoot buffet of inscrutable interfaces, haphazard form factors and lug-nut functionality before the iPhone steamrolled the industry and made every phone giant from Nokia to RIM to Sony into a gasping wannabe.
This, more than anything, appears to be the Jobs way. From chaos to grace. From confusion and incoherence to a singular, Zen-like clarity, ease, a mystical, trademark je ne sais quoi that no other visionary, no other CEO or company on the planet has been able to match. And from the looks of things, it might be awhile.
Do you want to try it? Imagining what the world would have been like without the Jobs influence, his design perfectionism, his Cassandra-like ability to see what would make our computers, our music, our conversations, our digital worlds more interesting, more gratifying, more all-around enchanting to use? It’s a bit like imagining the world if chocolate had never been invented. Or light bulbs. Or singing. Sure it’s OK and all, but, you know, damn.
Maybe this is the only question that matters, and the one that so easily puts Jobs on par with the most revered visionaries of this, or any age. What price grace? How to properly value not merely Chinese-made gizmos, but an entire liberal arts-inspired ethos that insists on making the messy, ridiculous modern world a thousandfold more lucid and enthralling, on making products that actually enrich lives, that inspire you to create beyond your normal range and capabilities?
In the coming weeks, once all the global accolades and tributes die down, it’s likely you’ll hear some whines coming out of the geek woodwork, various Apple haters grumbling that Jobs was overrated, his vision lopsided and flawed, that Apple was imperfect and closed-minded and didn’t sufficiently cater to the petulant open-source ubergeeks, ad nauseam. Whatever.
All you have to do is ask. Ask nearly anyone who owns any of the “i” family (Pod/Pad/Phone/OS), or maybe the stunning MacBook Air, or just about anything the company’s churned out in the past decade. You’ll hear essentially the same answer, coupled to a very familiar gleam in the eye: “Oh my God I love this thing.” It’s something akin to glee, to simple joy of using something that works so well, miraculous in its power, delightful to hold, completely confident of its place in the world. Try that with a Blackberry.
There’s a word for this sort of emotionally charged human/object interface, and it’s a word that’s almost never used when speaking of the cold, drab world of computer technology. The word is intimacy.
Simply put, Apple products make you want to touch them, interact with them, develop a personal relationship. They somehow spontaneously weave into your personality, like they were there all along, obvious and welcome and true. In other words, spend a week with a new iPhone and you start pitying the sad, lost person you must’ve been before you had it. Now that’s love.
I remember one of the first reviews of the iPad, coming shortly after all pundits everywhere predicted an epic failure for Apple’s awkwardly named tablet, that Jobs had finally overreached and the iPad would finally put an end to his unprecedented run of success. How cute they all were a few weeks later when sales skyrocketed, eating a million pounds of crow like that.
But never mind that now. The reviewer said that it wasn’t that the iPad was effortlessly gorgeous and easy to use, which everyone expected. It wasn’t that it exploded the iPhone’s functionality in radical and wonderful new ways apparently only Jobs could see.
It was that, 20 minutes into using the thing, after you’ve loaded up some photos and populated the iTunes library and stocked up on a few fave apps, suddenly the thing just clicks, there’s a hint of life, a connection. It’s as close as you can get to a personal relationship with a gadget shy of a Real Doll and gallon of WD-40. Amazing.
In the end, what matters is what you hold in your hand. What matters is how our various modern creations align with the soul. What matters is the amazing tech upon which I write these very words (MacBook Pro, minimalist wireless Apple keyboard, LCD cinema display), perhaps the most intuitive, beautifully designed pieces of mass market industrial design of our age.
And there’s really only one person to thank for it all, and he was a quiet, blue-collar Zen Buddhist college dropout multibillionaire who credits LSD for giving him a “Think Different” approach to the world. So much for business school.
Hence, sadness abounds. Jobs was only 56. Had he survived, who knows what he might have come up with over the next 20, 25 years, what industries he could have exploded, what young designers and programmers he would have inspired, what sort of glorious new devices he would have held up at Moscone Center in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans and “One more thing” master salesmanship. We will never know.
Well, we might know a little. Apple will likely cruise along just fine for a number of years on the sheer momentum of Jobs’ vision and corporate roadmap. There are surely a number of products in the Apple pipeline with his vision all over them. We’ll probably be OK for awhile.
But will it be enough time? For new energy to emerge, for a new visionary to step up, for the massive creative void Jobs left to be adequately filled? Impossible to say. Because while the world may be full of visionaries, it turns out Jobs was a bit more than that. Or a lot more. How do we know? Because as it stands right now, the world without him already feels a little more drab, murky, lost. Let us iPray.
