On January 27, 2010, in San Francisco, Apple unveiled the iPad e there was the last, great presentation by Steve Jobs. He will die in October 2011 and will take the stage a handful of other times in the meantime.
But the presentation of the iPad is considered epochal, like that of the MacIntosh, the iPod or the iPhone. A time when technology has changed people’s lives. As often happens, the debut was preceded by a widespread one skepticism and was followed by overly optimistic forecasts (the end of personal computers). Among the many articles that came out the next day all over the world, I picked up what Vittorio Zucconi wrote for Repubblica, who was not a technologist but had an unmistakable imaginative style. As can be seen also on this occasion, in which tells the story of “The Last Magic of Steve Jobs”.
“The father was called Abdul Fatah and he came from Syria, from the land of Saul the tax collector, of the falls from his horse, of the mysticism that his son Steve would have translated into the cult of his Bitten Apple, a kind and eloquent symbol of his disobedience to the gods of computer, embodied in the iPad, the new table of the law according to Apple. The story of the great IT apostate who at 55, as often happens to revolutionaries, the pope of a religion called Apple, of this Steve Jobs who took the surname of his adoptive father and founded a sect of rebels against the overbearing Catholicism of Big Blue Ibm and Microsoft, could only arrive yesterday at the brazenly evocative moment of the presentation of the tables, tablet computers, in the Erba Buona (mint) building in San Francisco, after years of waiting, anticipations, novenas, skepticism and prophecies. Because everything that surrounds life, and the near resurrection from pancreatic cancer and then from a liver transplant, of Jobs, yesterday appeared increasingly worn and fabulously ascetic for the launch of this giant iPhone, from the youth amidst integral veganism, gurus, Zen meditations, inevitable pilgrimages to India, betrayals of apostles turned into Judas in the boards of directors, is not the biography of a successful man. A Gospel according to Steve. It is therefore no coincidence that the first apostles of truth made of plastic, integrated circuits, chips and silicon materialized in the new creature called the Macintosh, men like Guy Kawasaki, Mike Boich or Alain Rossmann they called themselves, semi-seriously, the evangelists. They felt chosen by the new god to spread the word and release the slaves of other computers from their chains. His declared affiliation to Buddhism adds that element of harmless universal mildness that his imperious personality and above all the aggressiveness of his marketing belie. “The ultimate egolatrix in a world of egolaters,” Fortune magazine called him. A pirate, at times, of other people’s ideas, as he himself called himself (“it’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy,” he said). More than a Tibetan monk, Steve is reminiscent of a Templar launched in search of the Holy Grail. Since, precisely in the home of the adoptive parents, neglecting the studies and the classrooms, fiddled with his friend – then betrayed or traitor Steve Wozniak to assemble computer kits with the corporate label of “Homebrew”, meaning “home-brewed”, until the founding of Apple Computers inspired by apples in the orchards of California’s Eden (the bite was added lest it resemble a tomato ) Jobs’s perfectionism and obsession have always been the same: not to produce a laptop, a desktop, a mobile phone, a music player better than competitors, as every company wants to do. But to create something that changed the lives of the faithful, that changed their relationship with the universe, through those objects. That it was a “revelation”, as he wanted to be the first appearance of his new tables made yesterday. From his first commercial product in 1983, the computer christened “Lisa”, perhaps or coincidentally from the name of his first daughter (now he has four, and finally a wife) with whom he had a bad paternal relationship, to the “tablets” of law exhibited to the tribe of converts, many, not all, of the objects baked from the Cupertino campus in California they changed pieces of our daily life. The Macintosh, Lisa’s successor, with the name of a famous quality of sour apples, affirmed the gospel of the GUI, the “Graphic User Interface”, that world of histograms, icons and mice that ousted the arcane language of written command strings . IPods, music players, have been sold for 220 billion pieces (in reality they were millions, ed), in vain imitated by envious giants like Sony or the eternal rival Microsoft, and have succeeded in the miracle of convincing billions of consumers to buy. , not just to steal or copy, songs through the Apple Store. The minicomputer in a pocket or handbag, disguised as a mobile phone, the iPhone, of which the iPad – a name that reminds many American women too much of the feminine pad, as an NBC anchor said – he is the obvious child on steroids, he has passed the billion mark in sales. Useful, important, innovative, sometimes revolutionary objects, even if the idea of the graphic interface, of the icons to click with the mouse was essentially pirated by Xerox; and always beautiful, physically desirable, exquisitely designed and impeccably manufactured (in Taiwan especially), to disprove one of the tenets of the computer industry: that the mythical businessman, the business man or woman, would have disdained the aesthetic cuteness of gagdets. Like all religions, even the cult of Apple is embodied in its own prophet and every appearance of Jobs thinner from ailments, ghostly in his black dolce vita sweaters, produces leaps and collapses in the course of Apple’s actions, so obvious is the identification of the Word with Man, of the product with the producer. And as Steve harangued ex-infidels turned universal church, his private portfolio of securities, in a Wall Street uncertain whether to believe or to be skeptical, it exceeded the value of $ 5 billion. Nobody ever went bankrupt in America by selling religion, said a cynic. “