I remember landing in Amsterdam on October 5, 2011 after being in the air for almost 10 hours. I turned on my iPhone and AP news alerts started pinging my phone as happens when a “world event” takes place. I read through the Fox News, CNN, Sky News alerts and articles, and read through my Twitter and Facebook feeds. As we pulled up to the gate I had already received the text below from Deborah (yes I have all my text messages from years ago), a message received in my hand sitting on a runway in the Netherlands thousands of miles away from Auburn, Alabama.
As we pulled up to the gate I took the photo above of the Delta flight parked next to our gate, pulled it into my Camera+ app, put a boarder around it and posted it to Instagram. At this point I had already checked my email, responded to a few emails, and looked up our connecting flight information. All from a small piece of metal, glass, and plastic that didn’t exist a few years earlier.
This may sounds like a lot of poetic musings for a phone, but for some reason my mind wasn’t ready for this particular piece of news that morning, and it confused me. I was on my way to Africa, and the only reason I was going to have any personal connection with my wife halfway around the world was because Steve Jobs had decided he was going to invent and create what I was holding in my hand.
Here was a man who shared no convictions with my faith, a brilliant man who had no understanding beyond the pluralistic view of Christianity known for centuries mixed with his version of Buddhism. He just couldn’t go beyond his own understanding and even made this statement to Isaacson:
“The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t.”
Yet I still felt some connection, even if a minor one, with Jobs, sitting on a runway in Europe, as if the plane full of people melted away leaving me and my connection with Jobs sitting in my hand. He shared none of my beliefs, yet he changed the world, my world, and still does on a daily basis. After I got home from Africa I read, back to back, the biography on Steve Jobs and the biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Metaxas. What an amazing contrast of times and cultures, beliefs, and both had the ability to change the world. Ultimately in death, as we all will do some day, either looking to what lies ahead, one perhaps clinging to life here on earth, so did these two great men.
I boarded the plane to Africa, still thinking about Jobs’ fate and wrote this as we took off.
The biggest surprise to me so far [on this trip], was upon landing, finding out that Steve Jobs died. I was truly saddened to hear this. I know we are all temporary to this world, but this man, who for all accounts wasn’t a believer, changed the world. He forever changed the way the world communicates, how we are connected with each other, and the reason I can talk to Deborah from this plane in Europe while she is in Auburn.
He affected so many people through his innovations. How are we to greave his death? I’m saddened over his death as if he was someone I knew personally, and at the same time I really don’t know why either. Death seems so imminent for all of us, especially when you hear about Jobs dying at 59. I know why we die, the fall created this and Christ had to die for us, but it’s still so hard to understand. I didn’t even know Jobs, but I will miss him. The new iPhone announcement yesterday had people wanting to see Jobs at the event, people who never knew, other than God, that he would die the very next day. I pray for his soul.
I’m not even really sure why I write this today other than to acknowledge the gravity this one person had on our world. A person I vastly disagree with on almost all aspects of life, yet he was someone who had a positive impact on so many people.
Jobs once said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” which really became his whole life philosophy, and was carried on today by Tim Cook and Apple with the video on their front page and the letter below. What other for-profit company would take down their entire front page just to show a 2 minute tribute video. Simplicity and sophistication.
40 responses to “On Apple’s Tribute to Steve Jobs One Year Later”
People die every day.
indeed… but not all of us change the way the world works. We all do change the way the world is though, even if it’s on a micro level… Jobs changed it on a scale few have done.
He changed the world alright. It became common practice that people have to ask a private company with arbitrary in-house rules for permission with regard to what kind of apps they can write, what kind of business model they can have, what kind of things they can sell and what kind of message they can deliver.
He managed to make it common practice that people carry high-tech, always on, sophisticated covert spying devices: devices which know people’s location in real time, social relations, interests and which systematically provide this information back to Apple, and, automatically, the US government…and likely anyone else willing to pay for the information.
He managed with a bit of shine to entice people so much that they would be willing to sign NDAs just to be able to develop software for his OS, in line with an already strong tradition of no transparency about how Apple treats its customers. And I’m not going to even start on DRM, locked down devices etc.
Nothing to do but to hope we don’t have too many other similarly capable and like-minded visionaries.
https://regoc.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/the-rotten-apple/
Sounds like a pretty smart individual to me if that’s was his objective, although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. And to that, I would say, no one is forced to use or carry an iPhone… my sister doesn’t even have a cell phone (though I know that’s rare).
His legacy (the one I skimmed over), not his “smarts” are what’s important about him. WWII German doctors conducting painful and leathal experiments on prisoners were probably smart, too, but their smarts are not the most imporant or interesting thing about them, either.
As for Jobs’ objectives, it doesn’t matter if the effects his company had on computing technology and culture were side-effects or not: the amount of harm he caused does not depend on his reasons for causing it.
Finally, while it’s true that no one forces me to use or carry an iPhone, it is also irrelevant. The point is that because of Jobs’ herritage, in 5-10 years I, you and many other people might very well *be* forced to live in totalitarian societies, police states, where – thanks to the likes of Apple, Google, PayPal, Skype and Microsoft – survaillance on a scale never before seen will effectively undermine every value people have been fighting for for the last several centuries. Even short of that, the protectionist, competition-stifling, censored, privatised freedom of expression approach to commerce Jobs managed to globally promote is a plague that deserves the same kind of treatment as the one Microsoft got from the European Commission for bundling its browser and media player with its OS. In Apple’s case, that might mean billions of euros in penalties for fair trade violations, mandatory and immediate opening to 3rd party sources of software and products that by default don’t send any information to anyone from any specific device.
Oh, and one more thing: no one forces me to use or carry an iPhone *yet*…how long do you think will it be until cash is deprecated? Do you think 10 years from now you will be able to buy anything in a supermarket without a phone? It might not be an iPhone, but Google seems to be working hard on providing a rich choice of almost equally locked-in devices…and that’s kind of future Jobs was bulldozing the world into. Jobs was exploiting the extreme short-sightedness of the average citizen in terms of where technology is going and how it will be used: no one forces you to use an iPhone today, but when you can’t vote without it, can’t trade without it, can’t travel or drive without it…then you might have a “what were we thinking” moment, but then it will be hard to go back. That’s 5-10 years from now: not 50.
You make very good points, and I agree with many of them, but, your comparison between the WWII German doctors and the likes of Apple, MS, Paypal etc is not completely comparing apples to apples (not the corporate pun kind). The socialist, utilitarianism you are describing is a governmental issue, not a free marketplace issue. I agree, these companies make possible the technologies that governments can use to suppress or control, but that hasn’t changed since Rome (or earlier). In fact, it almost sounds like you are saying technology is the problem, not the solution or something, where making sure government doesn’t continue to gain power beyond what the Founding Fathers (assuming you are in the U.S.) designed.
I will argue that has already happened, and the government is far far beyond it’s role of keeping us safe and providing roads for us to drive on, but that is where the comes in, not in the technology companies innovations. What Apple has done is not new, this is what the human race has done since the garden. Innovate, advance, etc., there isn’t anything we can do to stop the advancement of the human race… but… we can stop governments from ruling over us.
I bet when George Orwell’s wrote 1984 he had no idea has accurate he was going to be, we have well surpassed his reality, and are creating a new one, but we can’t stop companies from inventing and creating? You’re right though, the cycle is 5-10 years now, not 50-100.
You are correct. The only difference is that people will remember Steve jobs for a long time. No one will remember you.
It is being said that Apple is actually moving on, rather than living in the past. Not a bad thing.
Well said!!
Great article, the way you have shown how he changed the world is brilliant, we have a similar article on our website: http://www.futuretechreview.wordpress.com
He did alot for the communications field..he was a true visionary that will be missed and am very happy to see Apple moving on despite the loss!
Nice post – I had similar thoughts when I heard of his passing. I thought about how much we have adapted to life after apple – how many things have changed since that first “i” device.
I agree! Sometimes I forget about the dark ages before my iPhone, haha.