I was in the third hour of a three - hr meeting on the good afternoon of October 5 , 2011 , and I was feeling a spot punchy . The twenty-four hours before was an all - out dash to cover Apple ’s press conference and its radioactive dust , along with plenty of expert snafus . So I was tired , the room was lovesome , and my judgement was rove .
Fatigue and stuffiness lead to an inappropriately Deep Thought . And so I was struck by the fact that all of us has a alliance that is unstated , obvious , and yet incredibly relevant : We ’re all aliveright now . We ’re the the great unwashed who lived through the end of the 20th Century and the commencement of the 21st . Not just the the great unwashed in the conference elbow room , but every individual one of us . Despite all our differences , we share one immense bond : we are the people who are alert decently now , powerful this very import . We were n’t in the past , and we wo n’t be at some indeterminate point in the future , but right now we are all survive in the world .
I walked back up the stairs after the get together and almost immediately got the news program that Steve Jobs was gone from that world .
When I got back here in 1997 , I was looking for more way , and I regain an archive of old Macs and other stuff and nonsense . I say , ‘ Get it away ! ’ and I shipped all that s—- off to Stanford . If you depend rearward in this business , you ’ll be crushed . You have to look ahead .
— Steve Jobs , 2009
I did n’t know Steve Jobs . Most of us did n’t . I interacted with him a few times , asking a few press - conference questions , interview him on the telephone set once . But like the eternal rest of you , I felt some kind of strange connecter with him . He was the fount of the company I ’ve covered for coming up on 20 year . His return to Apple saved it from oblivion . And then we got the world - deepen product : Not just the Mac , which had redefined what a “ personal computer ” was in the ’ 80s , but the iPod , the iPhone , and the iPad .
Steve Jobs did n’t invent those product singlehandedly in his garage , legends be damned . There are 100 of brilliant the great unwashed at Apple who merit the credit for make the company ’s implausibly democratic product . But Steve Jobs was the guy who created the environment those products were built in . He ’s the one who prodded the people at Apple to make their prototypes better . He made Apple what it is . What the company does from here on out , it does because of him .
business ’s greatest creation is n’t any Apple product . It is Apple itself .
— John Gruber , 2011
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October 2003 . He had surgical operation in 2004 , and later a liver organ transplant . Everyone at Apple has a lot of sentence to prepare for this day . It still comes as a shock — though Steve ’s resignation in August was a clear monition sign — but at least the moment has been prepared for .
No company is genuinely ever ready for the loss of its founder , loss leader , and ghostly guide . And filling a nullity left by Steve Jobs will be one of the most difficult chore ever . But if there ’s ever a company that ’s had time to reflect on how to maintain that leader ’s bequest and agency of thought , it ’s Apple . The company limit upApple Universityas a way to maintain Apple ’s corporate culture in a post - Steve world . Today ’s Apple is the company that Steve Jobs built after his homecoming in 1997 . The executives are citizenry who worked with him . For the past few years they have all been aware , as has job , that the company would survive him .
Will they come through ? There ’s no way to reply that question . Apple ’s equitation as in high spirits as almost any company ever has . There will be lurch — but there would ’ve been trip-up with Jobs in charge , too . ( Jobs ’s runway phonograph recording contains an harebrained amount of hits , but also a few miss . ) But still , there has never been a company better prepared for a loss like this .
“ We ’re here to put a dent in the universe . Otherwise why else even be here ? ”
— Steve Jobs
If you made a movie of Steve Jobs ’s life ( not that one ) , nobody would believe it . Think of how many amazing founding have come from a Steve Jobs - deal company . The Apple II , the world ’s first mass - raise personal computer . The Macintosh , the basis for almost every single personal computer interface on the major planet today . Pixar , one of the most successful moving picture studios of all time . The iPod and iTunes , which transubstantiate the music industry and changed how we listen to music . The iPhone , which upend the moribund cellular telephone industry and make the conception of a modern smartphone . And the iPad , which set a category and devote off the original Mac ’s hope of being a “ computer for the eternal rest of us . ”
This is fabled stuff . I ’m still trying to process it , to give it some time and not just start chantingsanto subito , but it ’s hard not to look at that list and guess that Steve Jobs will go down in the story of job and industry as alegendary figurelike Thomas Edison or Henry Ford . That those of us who are lucky enough to grow old and rickety ( in a way that , cruelly , Steven Paul Jobs was never allow to ) will say that we saw that man stand upon a stagecoach with a jumbo Apple logo behind him and introduce a new iconic , world - convert product .
In a hundred years , perhaps he will have been reduced to a caricature . chronicle does that . Maybe he ’ll be seen as some genius artificer who create the first computing machine in his service department . It wo n’t be an exact image , necessarily , when seen through the mist of time . But I have a hard fourth dimension suppose he wo n’t be remembered .
But the biggest thing about iPod is that it bind a thousand song .
— Steve Jobsintroducing the first iPod , 2001
My daughter was have a bun in the oven in the interregnum between the announcement of the iPod and its release to the world-wide populace . Those of us who were fortunate enough to attend the Apple event introducing the iPod make to take review units home , run beta software system and pre - stiff with music .
As my wife toil to bring my girl into the mankind , she did so with music playing . It was a particular play list she had progress in iTunes .
This is not special now . This is part of the textile of our lives . You make a playlist and then wager it back . At a birth , or a birthday party , or some other societal event . But back then nobody had iPod yet . Nobody except people from Apple and a few members of the medium .
I might have been one of the first people to have an unerasable personal present moment chance to the soundtrack of an iPod , but hundreds of millions more would follow .
The world before the iPod , when Apple was just a computer company , seems so long ago . My girl turns ten next month .
remember that I ’ll be dead soon is the most authoritative tool I ’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life . Because almost everything — all external expectation , all superbia , all fear of embarrassment or nonstarter — these thing just fall away in the facial expression of death , leaving only what is in truth important . remember that you are going to die is the serious direction I know to forfend the trap of thinking you have something to turn a loss . You are already au naturel . There is no reason not to follow your nub .
— Steve Jobs , Stanford University commencement address , 2005
The most one - on - one prison term I spent with Steve Jobs was a phone consultation for the 20th anniversary of the Mac and Macworld in 2004 . We spent six month set up what ended up being about a 10 - instant - long phone call , if that .
My last question to him was — and this was just after the “ interim CEO ” days — how long he matte he ’d abide at Apple . He intermit to contemplate for a instant . Then said , and I ’m paraphrase here , “ Well , you fuck what the song says . We ’re all just renting clock time here on major planet Earth . ” His tone seemed very different from the residuum of the consultation , and I in reality appreciated that he was so philosophic about it . Who can say what the time to come hold ?
A while later it came out that my conversation with him took place in the periodjustafterhe had received his first cancer diagnosis , but before he had decided to get discussion . It all made a bit more sense then .
For the past 33 years , I have looked in the mirror every morning and ask myself : “ If today were the last day of my life , would I want to do what I am about to do today ? ” And whenever the answer has been “ No ” for too many years in a row , I hump I need to change something .
Steve Jobs could have left Apple at any point after his cancer diagnosing . He had enough money to buy one of those secret islands that only sway stars and James Bond villains can afford . That he did n’t , even after living ( briefly ) with a death sentence before it was transmuted into a future of struggling with cancer , tells you something about his passion .
Apple was his passion . Not just the companionship that he base and then rescued , but what Apple represented . Apple as an engine that take the high engineering the human backwash had yet fabricate and turned it into products that people would buy , use , and love . It ’s recite that at legion Apple events , Jobs would hale out his street - sign slide , the one that indicated that although Apple ’s reference was 1 Infinite Loop , the company ’s heart was firmly plant at the product of Technology and Liberal Arts .
Do you really want to trade sugar water , or do you want to fall with me and shift the existence ?
— Steve Jobs , enter John Sculley to become Apple CEO , 1983
Here ’s the affair about Steve Jobs : If we were compose about his life in 1987 , or 1997 , or even 2002 , the story would be very different . In those days Apple was an outlier , an oddball company that made unearthly , incompatible products used only by a little figure of citizenry . chore would have been far-famed , especially for the Apple II and the Mac , but a lot of the fib would have been how Apple lost the PC - industry struggle to Microsoft Windows .
count at Apple today . It ’s one of the most valuable companies in the world . Apple is n’t a uncanny brand any longer , it ’s among the most placeable brands in existence . Its stores are perhaps the most profitable retail electric receptacle in the world . The Mac is more successful than it ’s ever been , but even personal computer substance abuser have adopt the iPod , iPhone , and iPad . former rival Microsoft spent a decade endeavor to excuse to citizenry why they ’d want a tablet microcomputer with no achiever . In a single shot Apple enter the iPad , redefined the family , and created a hit intersection .
That ’s the story of the last ten years of Steve Jobs ’s life . In that ten years , he took Apple from being an peculiarity to being as mainstream as it gets . The ism that failed Apple in the PC industriousness of the ’ 80s and ’ 90s turn out to be a winning philosophy in the digital - contrivance epoch of the 2000s .
It might not have appear like it in 2001 , but in 2011 it ’s unmortgaged . This is not the story of a talented but under - appreciated man whose merchandise were influential while his company flailed and failed while others made billions on his good musical theme .
This is a story of victory . In the closing , the humans embraced Apple . It embraced Steve Jobs . And the world ’s a better place because he was in it .
Now we have to move on without him . But I feel prosperous that , for four decades , we were both alive . And my life is better for it — as is yours .
Thank you , Steve , and goodbye . You made more than a few dents in the universe .
