Steve Jobs Departs a World He Helped Transform

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
By Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance

Steven P. Jobs was born on Feb. 24, 1955, into an era of rotary phones and room-sized computers. He died on Oct. 5, 2011, having contributed perhaps more than any other person to forging an age of personal computers, slick electronic tablets, and slender mobile phones with a thousand times more computing power than the old mainframes. Jobs was 56 when he died, of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was surrounded by friends and family, including his wife, Laurene, and their children.

Jobs was a total original. He was somehow able to blend iconoclasm, rock-and-roll, and chic industrial design with the nerd sciences, as well as the unseemly profit motive of the corporation. He made that contrary combination seem totally legitimate. His iconic products—iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad—literally changed the world, making people more connected in the virtual world and less so in the physical one. He had a knack for whipping customers and the media into frenzies of anticipation and adulation, and he often elevated the business of Apple with a touch of the poetic. “If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software is their soul,” was one of the last things he said publicly, at an Apple event on June 6.

Apple will undoubtedly suffer without him. All the various aspects of his contribution have been chronicled since his resignation on Aug. 24, ad nauseam. Jobs harangued his employees into meeting the standards of his own lofty perfectionism, over and over. He canceled as many projects and prototypes as he approved, which ended up focusing Apple’s attention and resources on just a few game-changing products. He was relentless at manipulating the media, by alternately withholding access and then granting it, and with theatrical product reveals and occasionally belligerent interviews. He could turn a routine press conference to introduce a new gadget into something as anticipated as the Super Bowl.

At Apple’s presentation of the new iPhone on Oct. 5, Jobs’s absence was gnawingly felt. Apple’s new chief executive, Tim Cook, and his fellow execs exuded confidence and used a lot of the same intonations as Jobs. But they did not come near to expressing his vivacious spirit or his deepness of feeling about Apple and its future. It felt, in a way, like they were auditioning for something. Cook himself repeatedly used the word “momentum” to express the company’s progress. Apple surely has that—shares of its stock are up 4,000 percent over the last 10 years. But Steve Jobs never had to repeat a word like that.

Jobs believed the best-looking, easiest-to-use computers and devices were seamlessly integrated products where both the hardware and software were created by the same company. That conviction was wildly out of fashion in the 1990s, when Microsoft ruled the land and companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard packaged computers around Bill Gates’s operating system and Intel’s microchips. Jobs tenaciously stuck to his principles and his revival of Apple—beginning in 1997 but really gathering steam with the 2001 release of the iPod—was not only a triumph of his vision, but a wholesale rejection of the previous decade’s conventional wisdom. “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it,” said President Barack Obama in a statement.

Silicon Valley will now be a different place. Tech companies here measure themselves against Apple; other CEOs compare themselves to Steve Jobs. Jobs had a role—the charismatic technology guru—that a generation ago was occupied by Robert Noyce, a co-founder of Intel. He seemed to somehow hover above the fellow entrepreneurs of his day. “Steve looked at us like we were stupid,” says Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a friend of Jobs’s. “There are not many people I would take that from. I would take that from Steve.”