In the clear light of 2012, let’s return to the Jobs Front. Steve Jobs, that is. Where even today, almost three months since he died on Oct. 5 (my birthday), he is making headlines. As in, the next big buzz-busting day in the Apple universe, rumored to be Feb. 24th (he would’ve been 57 that day), the firm (today at 2:15 p.m. [Jan. 3], the first trading day in 2012, up 1.4 percent, $410.76 a share) will launch its iPad 3.
Perhaps it’s time for sober rethinking about just what the tao of Jobs has wrought. There have been pockets of other voices. Consider, the London Review of Books, “Amazing or Shit,” a piece by Mattathias Schwartz on “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson http://bit.ly/tkQcQE. In the sea of panegyrics, it is a welcome correction:
“A talented hustler, he (Jobs as a young man) marked up junked components and impersonated a manufacturer over the phone to get free parts.”
“He tried to deny paternity of the daughter he fathered at the age of 23, and was careful to settle with her mother before Apple’s IPO.”
And in conclusion, drawing upon a comparison between Apple products and Zen gardens: “In 2020, making a video call on an iPad will feel about as sublime as booting up an Apple II does now, while a walk through the gardens of Kyoto will feel much as it did in 1920, 1820 and 1720. Jobs’s achievement was to make ephemeral machines and make them seem permanent.”
Not to mention, addictive – as the following post-holiday gift link from BuzzFeed makes abundantly (and distressingly obnoxiously) clear: http://bit.ly/vdX2w4
