In the fall of next year, it will have been 10 years since the passing of Steve Jobs. Jobs was born about a month after my father and lived almost exactly a dozen years longer, both men taking their last breaths in the month of October. I, of course, did not know Steve Jobs personally, but when he passed away I felt trembles that seemed to emanate from an intimately palpable sense of loss, though I did not understand why. To be sure, Jobs was a widely beloved public figure, but I recall the way I felt and processed the news as being qualitatively different than, say, when Kobe Bryant died earlier this year – Bryant’s tragic and untimely death seemed to shake many among the public much more profoundly than it affected myself. I was not a person of the technology industry, or involved with Apple in any way, other than being one of millions of customers of its products and a shareholder among countless others at one time or another. Yet I felt a certain sense of undeniable proximity to Jobs’s death.
When Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs came out shortly afterward, I bought and read it with an eagerness I seldom had toward other books. Interestingly it was the very last book I read on my Kindle ebook reader, with the majority of my subsequent “readings” taking place through audiobooks, and I happened to read it during a week in which I was bedridden, suffering from an inexplicable muscle pain in my legs which rendered me virtually immobile for multiple days. “It probably resulted from a flu-like viral infection” was the best guess from my doctor, and though it eventually went away on its own, it took about a full week for me to completely recover. It was a predicament anything even remotely resembling which I have never experienced before or after that episode in my life, and that I read Jobs’s biography during that unusual time may have contributed to the peculiar attachment to Jobs’s passing that I felt at the time and still do today.
Jobs, as is well known, was a fascinatingly complex person whose life could hardly have been more dramatic. Adopted at birth, a college dropout, he was a non-engineer who went on to found one of the most successful and consequential technology companies of all time, then got fired from it, only to return eventually as CEO not only to rescue it from the brink of bankruptcy but return it to a path of success magnitudes greater than the height of its former glory. He was, as fascinating people tend to be, a ball of contradictions: a charismatic leader who inspired awe and admiration in those that worked for him yet was often cruel, seemingly needlessly, to those most loyal to him; by many accounts a loving father, who named a landmark product after his daughter, but also had denied paternity for years to the same daughter; arguably an industrial designer of the highest order who obsessed over the tiniest of design details yet did not believe in furniture and kept his house mostly empty and barren of furnishing; a billionaire even prior to his return to Apple (through his Pixar stake) who claimed not to care about money or material possessions and took only $1 of annual salary yet had a notoriously complicated relationship with money and was involved in scandals around stock option backdating at both Pixar and Apple.
What I find most remarkable about Steve Jobs, though, is that he relentlessly pushed the world forward. Yes, he was an innovator who took bold risks and made amazing products that turned out to be extraordinarily popular even when such outcomes were far from guaranteed and skeptics abounded who thought he would fail. But what made Steve Jobs singularly brilliant was that he didn’t merely anticipate where the future was going to be and position himself there, thereby winning the acceptance of the public that was independently on a path to converge with his vision of the future; rather, he had an idea of what the future was going to be that was entirely his own and rallied everybody else in the world, somehow, into making that idea a reality. While he was not a technical wizard who could single-handedly invent new technologies and was therefore beholden to the prevailing pace of technological advancement, given the available technologies he took them as far as possible to transform what he dreamed up into real, tangible products. And through doing so, he also pulled the entire world along with him into accepting his products – and his vision for the future – not only as the state of the art, but the benchmark, and eventually, the baseline.
Just as importantly, he never stopped pushing. After the original Macintosh, after he got fired from Apple, after successes of the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, he continued to find a way to propel the world forward with the next new thing. The relentless march forward, to push the boundary to his conception of the furthest frontier possible, also meant that what was yesterday’s frontier could be sacrificed without hesitation if it no longer fit with tomorrow’s. Thus he could eliminate the optical drive which was so prominently featured in the original iMac from the subsequent models of Macbooks and iMacs; do away with the keypad for the iPhone and the stylus for the iPad; and cannibalize and eventually kill off the iPod in favor of the iPhone. The iPad, the experience of using which Jobs described as “magical,” was also to significantly replace one day, Jobs intimated, the Mac computers, saying that “PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.”
Today, without Jobs, Apple long ago stopped pushing the boundaries. It no longer pushes the world forward, leading everyone into a vision of the future that it creates. Instead, it has become a supremely efficient profit machine monetizing innovations of the yesteryear, and in the process has become arguably the world’s largest investment company, pouring half a trillion dollars into buying its own stock. Meanwhile, the iPad has failed to replace laptop computers in any meaningful way, and Apple has not come up with a new product that would cannibalize or even come close to threatening an existing product of its own. With no Steve Jobs around to push it forward, the world also, it seems, has stood still in the domain of personal computing.
Luckily, we have others in other domains. Elon Musk is pushing the world forward in electrification of vehicles and in space transport. Uber, for all its infamy, has fundamentally reshaped the face of mobility as a service. And Jeff Bezos and Amazon have irreversibly altered our conception of and expectation from retail. But still I can’t help but think that the world today would be so much different, so much better, had Steve Jobs been around. Could we have had Apple glasses? Apple electric car? Or pre-fabricated Apple house? It’s not so hard to imagine we would at least have the full-fledged Apple TV, an actual TV with a display panel, and certainly not with the disgrace of a piece of hardware that Apple ships with the current Apple TV which it calls the remote. But with Jobs gone, our future is no longer shaped by his obsessive drive. We are, sadly, worse off for it.