Ten years ago, on October 4, 2011, San Francisco: it is the launch day of the iPhone 4s. In the first row, reserved for Apple executives, there is an empty seat with the “reserved” sign, which is framed several times, before, during and after the presentation, perhaps to leave the hope that at the last moment Steve Jobs really appears. . He does not show up: he is struggling with the complications of pancreatic cancer, or even has already left this world, and the announcement was not made immediately so as not to ruin Tim Cook’s first keynote as CEO.
Disappearance
The news came the next day: Steve Jobs was dead. As I wrote then, the world had lost a great innovator, a visionary genius, an extraordinary storyteller. A marketing strategist, a tireless music lover, an attentive and generous father. Millions of people paid homage to him on the web, which for some time became his virtual cemetery, and left flowers next to the windows of the Apple Stores, temporary sanctuaries of a cult that venerated him as a god and a rock star at the same time. Ten years after Jobs’s death, every day thousands of employees cross the threshold of what was his biggest project, the Apple Park in Cupertino: it was Jobs himself who presented it to the city council of the Californian town in the last public appearance , skeletal and very weak.
The thought of Steve Jobs in 10 famous phrases
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death, we have collected 10 of his most famous phrases: aphorisms, passages from interviews or public speeches that summarize the thinking of the Apple co-founder
The hug
The main building has a total area of 260,000 m2 and the entire Pentagon could find its place inside. It actually houses a lawn, a pond and fruit trees. Apricot trees, the same ones that in Jobs’s childhood grew right there, around what was then the headquarters of Hewlett Packard. “We have experimented with many different forms – Stefan Behling, the architect of Norman Foster’s studio who directed the Apple Park project, explained to me a few years ago – then in nine months of confrontation with Steve Jobs we have simplified each time and we have approached more and more to the final idea “. Which is not a circle, but a ring: “It represents a group of people embraced, as before a sports match, in which everyone is fundamental for the group. And there is no one in the center, there is no leader ”. Originally, says Behling, something was expected, but he doesn’t want to tell us what. “Then we made the void, a very Zen choice, in line with Steve Jobs’ ideas”.
Simplify
In the end, his most important invention is not the Mac, the iPhone, the iPod, but Apple itself, which today is the largest hi-tech company in the world, born and raised “at the intersection of art and technology” , as he said in his last keynote. Jobs arrives with a tireless work of subtraction: from the Macs he eliminates first the floppy disk, then the cathode ray tube, then the rotating hard disk, the video sockets and network connections. Indeed, in 2007, he deletes the word computer from the company name: Apple becomes a way of imagining things, a brand that can be put on any object, from TV to car. Technology comes out of nerd garages and becomes pop culture, it defines together the identity of everyone as an individual and of a generation as a whole. And for this it must be more and more evolved and more and more evanescent, step aside until it disappears.
The American dream
Jobs represents the American dream not once but twice, with his first lightning success (1976-1985) and his second, wiser and more mature period (1997-2011). Time after time it embodies the contradictions of the late sixties, the do-it-yourself ethics of the seventies, the faith in the future of the eighties. In the nineties he concentrated on Pixar, but it was only with the turn of the millennium that he started to become the first guru of the information society. But Jobs will not be remembered for what he invented: the PC with a graphic interface is not his idea, neither is the iPod; before the iPhone there were already smartphones and tablets were launched by Microsoft ten years earlier than the iPad. Even his most famous phrase, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”, is not his but taken from a book that symbolizes the Californian counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand.
The storyteller
Jobs possessed a gift for storytelling, coupled with an ability to predict the sometimes prophetic future. Long before Google or the public Internet, Jobs talked about how networked computers would “have the entire library of Congress at hand.” He spoke of video games not as trivial wastes of time, but as “simulated learning environments” where “the more you learn the basic principles, the better your score”. He often called computers “a bicycle for our minds”. His keynotes are often studied, imitated, copied: but this does nothing but emphasize the distance from the original, the lack of rhythm, irony, sense of the spectacle that afflict today’s presentations. Tim Cook himself struggled a lot before finding his voice, and Apple keynotes can only be said to be modeled after a different style since they went virtual, with the pandemic.
Making history
In the form, however; for in essence the concept that technology can help overcome barriers has become popular, and inevitably a bit rhetorical too. When he announced the iPhone 13 last month, Tim Cook said Apple is “designing the best products and services to enrich people’s lives.” Microsoft product manager Panos Panay talked about how the new Windows is “a home for billions of people to do their jobs, live their dreams and connect with the people they love.” Elon Musk wants to save humanity by taking it to Mars, should a catastrophe endanger its survival on Earth. Uber explained that its platform not only connects drivers and passengers, but changes the way we move around cities, providing new revenue opportunities together. In its very small, WeWork also presented itself as the architect of a “profound change in technology, demographics and urbanization”. And yet none of today’s CEOs are able to create a distortion field of reality as Jobs did: he presented a new product and it seemed that every time it was destined to change the history of the world. It hasn’t always happened, but for sure at least twice. In 1984, when he introduced the first Mac and set the standard that all PCs would follow for decades to come. With the launch of the iPhone, in 2007, he opened the way to the post-PC era: first smartphones and tablets, in the future televisions, watches, gadgets of all kinds, with powerful processors always connected to the internet.
The paradigm
Forty years later, Apple is the most valuable company in the world. It has changed the lives of billions of people who use its products today. But also to all the others: smartphones, for example, today are faster, more powerful, larger, but they remain very similar to the first iPhone, even when they do not have the Apple logo. And let’s think of the computer, with the desk, the folders, the files: how different is it really from the Lisa, which Apple launched in 1983, a year before the most famous Mac? And this regardless of the operating system, be it Os X or Windows. Again, how far have tablets evolved from the first iPad? Thus Apple becomes a paradigm, which can be imitated, as often happens, or questioned, but never ignored; not even today, which seems more attentive to strategy than to real innovations.
Ten years
In all likelihood, Tim Cook will remember Jobs’ disappearance in an email, as he has done on other occasions. He will explain that the company still relies on the values of its founder, perhaps reiterating the mantra of the new Apple: “We work to leave the world better than we found it.” Still, it’s safe to bet, Jobs wouldn’t have loved this anniversary, just as he didn’t like birthdays and anniversaries. When he returned to Cupertino after the years of exile in Next, he freed the premises of the Apple museum, where a copy of the entire production was kept since the first computer in 1976: “We need space,” he said, and the devices were donated to Stanford University. It is not enough to have created a brilliant invention, you have to learn to start over every time, because life is a continuous movement. And perhaps this is Steve Jobs’ most important lesson: never stop changing, betting on the future, looking for yourself.
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