RiP: A Creators Project Tribute to Steve Jobs

What follows is a tribute to Steve Jobs written by our brothers over at The Creators Project. It's not that we don't appreciate what Steve Jobs has done for the world – there are quite a few Macbooks and iPods in the office today currently mourning the loss of daddy – but when it comes to technology and computers and wires and stuff, TCP are the guys we defer to. RiP, Steve.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool 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.”
– Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement speech, 2005

Would modern life be the same without Steve Jobs? It’s hard to imagine a world without the products he helped create powering our daily experiences and social interactions. He was the world’s greatest reinventor, who shunned focus groups and the usual market research and instead turned inward, using his intuition and personal experience to understand what people wanted from technology. Jobs designed products that weren’t just beautiful to look at, they were a joy to use because they reflected a humanistic approach to technology that didn’t exist before Jobs got in the game.

Plenty has been written on how aesthetics, design, and the arts played a huge role in Apple’s success and, perhaps, this was Jobs’ greatest legacy at Apple. The company is the embodiment of art meets tech, and did a great deal to help humanise technology at a time when it was cold, hard, and mechanical. Beyond just making products that were pretty and easy to use, Jobs ushered in an era of products that made us feel differently about technology, and that ability to tap into our emotions is nothing if not the mark of a great artist.

"It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough – it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing – and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices."
– Steve Jobs, after introducing the iPad 2 in March

Today, it’s practically required of artists to use his products in the creation of their work, and it’s testament to Jobs’ genius that the products themselves can stand alone as works of art, housed in the collections of museums all over the world. Jobs showed us that technology didn’t have to be something bulky and ugly but could be elegant and wondrous, embodying Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

He was a CEO idolised like a rock star, his product launches were like music concerts – the hype was immense but entirely justified. His attitude towards business was concerned with more than simply making money – although they’ve made plenty of that, Apple recently became the most valuable company on the planet, surpassing Exxon Mobil – it was more about changing and shaping the world. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me,” he once said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”

Like Ford, Rockefeller and Edison, Steve Jobs was an American business titan, but he was also a cultural icon, and he has defined an era. His legacy and inspiration remains – in a world of corporate cynicism and collapsed economic markets, he was a rare hybrid of artist and businessman who genuinely believed in what he was doing. He was a true visionary and a tireless innovator.

What’s also astounding is that his products have touched generations, with each generation citing an Apple product that changed their lives – from the Apple II to the iPhone. Here’s a look at some of his products that shook the world. RiP Jobs, your presence in this world will be sorely missed.

Apple II (1977)

This was the breakthrough product for Apple, with an integrated keyboard and sound, it showed that Apple was hungry to succeed. As payback for their dedication, the product was a commercial success and launched the company as a business. And, as software artist Scott Draves noted in our recent Tech Q&A, it was sympathetic to the hacking community that the company emerged from, “It was totally hackable. Anyone could program it, just hit reset and enter some code and go.”

Macintosh (1984) The Mac replaced the command line interface, the standard at the time, with a revolutionary graphic user interface that could be controlled with a mouse. The flair and spectacle with which Apple would go on to launch its products was sewn here, with a bold Super Bowl commercial (above). The system also saw the first release of Adobe Illustrator 1.0 in 1986, which was followed by Photoshop 1.0 in 1991.

iMac (1998)

Two years after his 1996 comeback, he launched the iMac. British designer Jonathan Ive created the brightly coloured shells and, significantly, his designs would help define a new period of prosperity for Apple.

iPod (2001)

It’s strange to think this iconic product is ten years old already. Apple weren’t the first to do MP3s but they were the first to take them mainstream. You could store 1,000 songs on the original iPod, which had a ten-hour battery life. The digital music revolution began here.

iPhone (2007)

Steve Jobs had revolutionised music and home computing. What next? Well, the mobile market. The highly usable touchscreen and elegant design made it the leading product in the mobile market and it shook up the industry, which has never been the same since. It transformed phones from being merely phones into full-on multi-media devices that have become our most treasured portals to the world.

iPad (2010)

When it was first unveiled it provoked ridicule. Now, 18 months later, every technology maker is releasing a tablet but none are able to compete with the iPad, which holds the share of the market. It has been used to create holograms, DJ with, paint and produce music albums – and is ushering us into a post-PC world. Unfortunately, it will also be a post-Jobs world.