He revolutionized technology. May he rest in peace.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday.
“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple said in a statement. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”
His family, in a separate statement, said Mr. Jobs “died peacefully today surrounded by his family…We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief.”
Sad.
UPDATE: Here is Jobs’s 1995 commencement address to Stanford University:
Transcript:
Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever–because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked 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 days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
UPDATE 2: Boing Boing‘s current front page is awesome, especially if you used Macs in the 80s and 90s:
Baud
I first read about his death on my iPod Touch. Fitting.
lamh34
I just read this.
Damn! RIP Steve Jobs.
I luv my IPOD and my IPHONE (soon maybe the IPAD). I can honestly say it has expanded my musical taste and library.
lol
Poor Sara. Even the end of her 15 minutes gets overshadowed.
Seriously though, very sad news.
THE
Sara who?
Sad news about Steve.
cleek
what a loss. wow.
Elie
RIP Steve Jobs. Getting my first iPhone next week…the first pc I learned on way back was an Apple — it was the easiest and most intuitive operating system to me at the time….
Brilliant man..
Another pioneer of a different sort also died today, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the fiery and effective leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Connference also passed today…
Both are in heaven
Elie
@THE:
Seriously…in a few months, no one will remember HER — even alive
Mary Jane
@THE: Palin. She just announced she isn’t running for Preznit. Shocker, huh?
xaneroxane
@Baud: Read it first on my iPad. An Apple Macintosh desktop was my first major purchase ever (as a college student). RIP…
Mnemosyne
Repeating myself from down below:
I was trying to find a Salon piece about Jobs from a few years ago in their Brilliant Careers series, but it looks like they’ve taken them all down. Feh. Basically, it was positing him as the greatest marketer in history because he was able to figure out what people would want if it was invented, not just what they said they wanted.
Say what you will, haters, but he’s the one who put the internet in everyone’s pocket. Other people had other ways of doing it, but he’s the one who figured out the way that would be the most popular and the easiest for the largest number of people. I know a 101 year-old woman who looks things up on her iPad every day.
ETA: G texted the news to me from his iPhone. I received it on my dumb phone (though I do also have an iPod Touch, an Apple laptop and a Mac Mini, so I’m fully covered, Apple-wise).
Short Bus Bully
@Mnemosyne:
This.
I don’t hate the man or hate Apple, but he was a salesman FIRST. And we all followed like Sheeple.
This is something to celebrate?
gwangung
@Short Bus Bully:
Um, no.
Figuring out what people wanted is not being a salesman. That’s the problem with Jobs’ detractors–they continually misunderstood what he did.
Dougerhead
He was not just a salesman, sorry, but that’s ridiculous. Next was truly grounbreaking and so was the iPhone.
lamh34
I don’t know how much input Jobs had in the advertisements for IPod, but not only did IPod change the way we listen to music, but damn if those IPod commercials are pop culture history…
One of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CPab8U5zTU
It is literally the reason why I bought this single from Jet. And I’m glad for it.
eemom
@Short Bus Bully:
pardon me, but I thought disrespecting the immediately deceased was something we reserved for the Dick Cheneys of the world.
Asshole.
Comrade Mary
People use the word “sheeple” unironically now? Um, OK.
I lack the Apple tattoo on my forehead, but I use the fuck out of my iPhone and iPod. Good on Steve for envisioning that one day so many people would want a portable phone that could play games, take pictures and video, and communicate via text in a myriad of ways.
(A week or so ago I fired up a YouTube video of a delightfully quaint 1978 tv report on “punk and new wave” music as I walked from my cubicle to the subway. 17 year old me would have had no clue what 50 year old me would be doing one day.)
Short Bus Bully
@eemom:
I think there’s plenty of respect flying around for the poor man.
And pardon me for not neatly falling into line as you think I should. I’ll keep my own counsel on this one, m’kay?
AxelFoley
Sorry to hear about Mr. Jobs’ passing. We knew he was not doing too well, and could guess it was from cancer, but still it’s sad nontheless.
I’m a big fan of his and Apple’s products. He’ll be missed.
soyaki
From the Herman Cain staff Twitters:
Note that Jobs was definitely a 1 percenter, so his passing is noted as a matter of solemn import by the #CainTrain.
Comrade Kevin
Minor thing: that video is from the 2005 Stanford commencement, not 1995.
eemom
@Short Bus Bully:
by all means. I never presume to counsel inhuman lowlifes.
MazeDancer
As they’re saying all over Twitter: iSad.
Feels like a timeline stopped. That a beginning has finished. Even though we’re still completely in the Stone Age of the Information Age, it will be different now.
Didn’t know Steve Jobs. Use his products every day and have since wheeling a Performa in a huge but beautifully printed carton in shopping cart out of Sam’s Club. Changed my life. Earned me money. I will miss Mr. Jobs without knowing him.
(That’s the Apple logo if you’re not on an Apple product. If you are, it’s Option+shift+k It you’re un-Apple, it reportedly, looks like a square.)
But some of the most emotional tweets are just that symbol, no other text:
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@soyaki:
herman cain backtracked on that and said that the loss of steve jobs was apple’s own fault.l
Mnemosyne
@Short Bus Bully:
You’re conflating marketing and sales — they’re not actually the same thing. Marketing is figuring out what people want and producing it; sales is getting people to buy your existing product.
I find it funny that you think it’s morally reprehensible to produce things that people find helpful in their everyday lives. Are washing machines morally reprehensible? Vacuum cleaners? Cars?
Mnemosyne
@MazeDancer:
Hey, it worked!
(Yes, I am spoiled — I get to use a Mac at my day job.)
Catsy
I have more than my share of problems with Apple’s patronizing we-know-better-than-you control-freakery over their products (and customers). And I’ll be the first to give you a laundry list of bad design decisions in my iPhone and iPad that I loathe beyond the describing of it and that in the case of the former would get me to switch to a Droid if they didn’t largely suck worse.
But I do own an iPhone and iPad despite that, and use the hell out of both of them.
So, RIP.
arguingwithsignposts
SiubhanDuinne
@MazeDancer:
Do you know how to make it on an iPad keyboard?
suzanne
This font savant here is in tears. God. I’m so sad.
MazeDancer
@SiubhanDuinne:
Could find no good answers on Google. It’s apparently not built into the system. Or it could be and I can’t find it.
But there is copying and pasting. Which you could do from this post . And pretty much half of Twitter
And there is also apparently an app called Glyphboard that has many symbols for the iPhone. Including the Apple logo.
SiubhanDuinne
@suzanne:
That story in his commencement speech he related about fonts and calligraphy and typography: just beautiful.
And that’s a point about Jobs that I think an awful lot of people will overlook as they focus on his technical and marketing genius: as far as I’m concerned, he helped make the world that much prettier. That alone can’t be a bad thing.
Hugs. It’s a big loss.
SiubhanDuinne
@MazeDancer:
Thanks, I’ll do some experimenting, now that my iPad is behaving itself again.
SiubhanDuinne
@MazeDancer:
:-)
suzanne
@SiubhanDuinne: Yanno, it’s about more than just the beauty, although as someone who would pay twice as much for a computer half as powerful as long as it was aesthetically pleasing, it’s certainly a huge part of his legacy.
Computers are now an indispensable tool for the modern expression of the self. And Steve Jobs envisioned that world, that whole way of being, back when people were lucky to have a four-function calculator on their desks.
THAT’S why he was a genius.
Rick Massimo
Try for one second to imagine one of today’s Masters of the Universe giving a speech like that.
Monkeyfister
No Willed endowments for the Poor, the Middle or Working Class, No nothing for anyone “down here,” nothing for the Arts?
via Bloomberg
Fuck him. Just another Rich piece of shit Techonocrat out for his own.
I hope his family has some scruples and some care.
SiubhanDuinne
@suzanne:
It’s about all of it, the whole being vastly more than the sum of the aesthetic-tech-marketing parts. Visionary is really the only word for him. But a visionary who was able to carry through, not just pie in the sky.
Comrade Kevin
@Monkeyfister: My, aren’t you the charming one. I assume you have inside knowledge of the contents of his will?
SiubhanDuinne
@Monkeyfister:
I just read that Bloomberg story. Looked in vain for something about how he left his money. I don’t know, and Bloomberg doesn’t know, and I’m good and goddamned sure you don’t know. So let’s lay off until the provisions of his Last Will and Testament are announced, shall we?
Mike G
I’m imagining the Fox News coverage, complete with the ‘Cavuto’:
Steve Jobs Dead at 56: Was it Obamacare?
Elizabelle
i Steve Jobs.
Thank you.
Kyle
I’m pushing 50, so cynicism is a constant comfort. I don’t gush about folks. However, I think Steve Jobs is one of the great Americans, the ones that will make the history books and be remembered for centuries. He changed the way we live in such significant ways. While he made an amazing amount of money, I always thought that he did it making good products sold to public who generally were always happy with what they bought. He didn’t seem like a grift artist trying to sell you something for more money than it was worth. That’s the kind of superrich America is supposed to create.
blackfrancis
iMourn.
Michael D.
Seems you can buy a liver, but not a cure for pancreatic cancer.
Steve Jobs made an incredible amount of money telling us how we should live. And he never gave a dime of it to anyone.
pixelpusher
Thanks for the pixels.