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Apple of my i

By Daily Bruin Staff

Oct. 10, 2011 11:51 p.m.

When Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple just over a month ago, I wrote a small piece praising his tenure as one marked by one accomplishment after another. The last sentence read, “The man will surely be missed.”

The Daily Bruin’s hardworking copy editors helpfully pointed out that the line sounded as if Jobs had already died. They were right. What a crazy idea, I thought.

I am sure no one needs to be told again that the news of his death was shocking. The chorus of praise that followed was less of a surprise. Here at last, it seems to me, is a man who fully deserves the hagiographic tone of postmortem discussion. Hyperbole, the standard register of death’s immediate aftermath, seems to suit Jobs. He did, after all, change the world.

We are so used to the celebration of mediocrity that it’s odd when celebrity does coincide with talent or vision. Jobs had both.

Mark Twain said “Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep until noon.” This ethos pervades celebrity culture where fame becomes a self-perpetuating phenomenon ““ the initial source of the fame (sometimes as unworthy as a sex tape) becomes less and less relevant, as the media gorges itself on dirty linen.

But it turns out we don’t actually need to waste our time on vapid celebrities. Fame still accrues to people who deserve it.

Allow me for a moment to run through some telling stories.

Scouting for a CEO in the early ’80s, Jobs decided on John Sculley. He was then a Pepsi-Cola executive who had recently closed the numbers between Pepsi and Coke ““ perhaps a rivalry in which Jobs may have seen something of the Apple-Microsoft contest.

How to lure the CEO of an established multinational to a 4-year-old company in a notoriously unstable industry? With one of the greatest pitches in the history of computing, of course: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

Fast forward to the late ’90s. Jobs, after an ouster that took twelve years to correct, returned to an Apple that, far from the lean operation of engineers he started, was then a bloated company on its way to irrelevance. In the process of clearing out dead weight, Jobs happened on a designer who was underappreciated and marginalized for years. Jobs gave this man, at the brink of handing in his resignation letter, license to exercise the full breadth of his creative powers. That was Jonathan Ive, probably the most influential designer alive ““ the genius behind the iMac (which set off a craze for transparent casings for a while), the iPod and the iPad.

In the above anecdotes, we see glimpses of the Jobs legend. The first suggests the exacting taskmaster, and the man of unshaking confidence and foresight. The latter showcases the knack for spotting potential. Both sides were central to Apple’s success.

Imagine the insight of making the computer personal. Dwell on the word “computer” for a moment, which in the mid-’70s did exactly what its name suggests. These were number-crunching machines that spat out data. How do we get from that to the computer we know now, a hub of images, storytelling, music and social interaction? The answer, a bit simplistic but truer than one might think, is Steve Jobs.

When we reflect on the irrelevance of what was once confidently styled “high art,” we have to consider the forbidding cliquishness that culture represents.

Computing was presented with the same temptation. There were men of limited imagination who thought computing would be an expert’s game. There were purists who scoffed at the Graphical User Interface, the system of presenting data through images, rather than just a vertical flow of interminable text. Think of the mouse pointer and folders that open onto windows, menus that pop up when clicked. Steve Jobs was central to that step forward.

Tim Berners-Lee, another one of those great figures littering the history of computing (he invented the World Wide Web), I think said it best. “A big thing Steve Jobs did for the world was to insist that computers could be usable rather than totally infuriating!”

In this age of rampant celebrity, where the obsessive hankering for personality takes precedence over any substance, Jobs shows that we can have our cake and eat it too.

Do you think Steve Jobs exemplifies the modern definition of a celebrity? Email Dolom at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected]

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