Steve Jobs R.I.P.

So Steve Jobs has died.  So young: only 56 – younger than me, and the same age as my dad was when he passed away many years ago.

By all accounts, he was an extraordinary guy, and there are hundreds of obituary columns published that do far more justice to his memory and with far more knowledge of the bloke than I can possibly hope to manage.  I’m not in any way trying to compete with them, but I wanted to commemorate him anyway.

I’ve never used an Apple pc, either the old ones that looked like boxes but are credited with opening up personal computing to a generation and introduced the mouse, nor those multicoloured transparent things that came out in the late 90s that looked amazingly cool.  Nor any of the company’s range of laptops that seem to be getting thinner and lighter by the model – my son has one and loves it.  I’m told they’re far better than your bog standard Windows pc, and that anyone in the creative world – designers, architects, whatever – would never dream of using anything else (whether that’s because the machines are so much better at certain things or these users are particular posers I have no idea).  But clearly, Jobs, the creative brain behind them all, made computers and laptops cool and Must Have accessories in a way that IBM and Michael Dell and Bill Gates never did (or could).  I don’t have an iPad, and to be honest I don’t really see the point of them – they seem too small for a proper laptop or computer, and too big for a mobile phone, but again Jobs has brought out something that everyone now seems to want and the likes of Samsung and RIM are playing catch up.  Interestingly, he apparently didn’t “invent” either, but he and his brand have made them Must Haves.  And that was the genius of the bloke.

I wanted an iPod, when they were getting really popular a few years ago (again, my son showed me his and while I wasn’t keen on his choice of music I was smitten by the idea) because I figured this would be a great source of entertainment when I was travelling – and much easier to carry than a Walkman or Discman, both of which were fine but meant lugging around collections of tapes or CDs as well as the player.  So I asked my wife for one as a Christmas gift.  Instead she bought me an iPhone – I had always been a Nokia man (and still am for work anyway), and I wasn’t convinced: I thought the iPhone a bit gimmicky.  But once I had got it and started using it, and spent a few days copying my favourite music onto my laptop, from there to my iTunes library and thence to the phone, I fell in love with it.  It’s now my Must Have travel companion, but interestingly I rarely actually use it as a phone.  This is because I can use it only on my local number (I can’t be bothered to have it chipped to accept my UK Vodaphone card) and that doesn’t have roaming, so it’s only ever a phone when I’m in Warsaw – a few days a month.  Likewise I rarely use the various news apps I have, the couple of games my kids have, all downloaded from the iStore (another Jobs innovation) and standard stuff like weather and stock price feeds that came with the phone.  But it’s my music on the move, and I’ve written in several posts on here how much pleasure I get from it, and how it preserves my sanity.

Steve Jobs is often quoted as saying his greatest wish was to make things better for people – and as far as I’m concerned, just with the iPod and iPhone he has done just that.  But looking more broadly, he has changed so much about the way we live and communicate with his various marketing triumphs (I won’t call them inventions, because in many cases he merely took other people’s kit, improved them immeasurably to fill gaps in the market that no-one else had perceived, and then marketed them brilliantly – which really is The American Way!)  - and that was the man’s genius.  His product launches were events, theatre even, that no-one else could carry off in quite the same way.  The latest, for the iPhone 4S, only the day before he died, was something of a dull and disappointing affair without his presence – even the product wasn’t as expected.  Like many other commentators, I do wonder how things will go for Apple in the future without him.

So farewell, Steve.  I didn’t know you at all, or your products particularly well, but that one little gem enriched my life beyond a doubt, and for that I thank you.

Rest in peace.