Would you like to react to this message? Create an account in a few clicks or log in to continue.

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

+3
Matthew
faithfully
FinnFreak
7 posters

 :: Miscellaneous :: News

Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Thu Oct 06, 2011 2:14 pm

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 SteveJobs


John
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Thu Oct 06, 2011 4:57 pm

FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by faithfully Thu Oct 06, 2011 5:50 pm

Freakin ell this was so sudden Shocked
faithfully
faithfully

Posts : 566
Join date : 2011-08-17
Age : 45

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Thu Oct 06, 2011 6:38 pm

CNN - October 6, 2011


Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Perheetujh061011_ul


By Brandon Griggs


(CNN) -- Steve Jobs, the visionary in the black turtleneck who co-founded Apple in a Silicon Valley garage, built it into the world's leading tech company and led a mobile-computing revolution with wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, died Wednesday. He was 56.

The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse. In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet -- all of which changed how we consume content in the digital age.

His friends and Apple fans on Wednesday night mourned the passing of a tech titan.

"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."

More than one pundit, praising Jobs' ability to transform entire industries with his inventions, called him a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci.

"Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism," New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. "His intuition has been phenomenal over the years."

Jobs' death, while dreaded by Apple's legions of fans, was not unexpected. He had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as chief executive in August because he could "no longer meet (his) duties and expectations."

Born February 24, 1955, and then adopted, Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California -- which would become home to Apple's headquarters -- and showed an early interest in electronics. As a teenager, he phoned William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, to request parts for a school project. He got them, along with an offer of a summer job at HP.

Jobs dropped out of Oregon's Reed College after one semester, although he returned to audit a class in calligraphy, which he says influenced Apple's graceful, minimalist aesthetic. He quit one of his first jobs, designing video games for Atari, to backpack across India and take psychedelic drugs. Those experiences, Jobs said later, shaped his creative vision.

"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," he told Stanford University graduates during a commencement speech in 2005. "You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

While at HP, Jobs befriended Steve Wozniak, who impressed him with his skill at assembling electronic components. The two later joined a Silicon Valley computer hobbyists club, and when he was 21, Jobs teamed with Wozniak and two other men to launch Apple Computer Inc.

It's long been Silicon Valley legend: Jobs and Wozniak built their first commercial product, the Apple 1, in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to help finance the venture. The primitive computer, priced at $666.66, had no keyboard or display, and customers had to assemble it themselves.

The following year, Apple unveiled the Apple II computer at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire. The machine was a hit, and the personal computing revolution was under way.

Jobs was among the first computer engineers to recognize the appeal of the mouse and the graphical interface, which let users operate computers by clicking on images instead of writing text.

Apple's pioneering Macintosh computer launched in early 1984 with a now-iconic, Orwellian-themed Super Bowl ad. The boxy beige Macintosh sold well, but the demanding Jobs clashed frequently with colleagues, and in 1986, he was ousted from Apple after a power struggle.

Then came a 10-year hiatus during which he founded NeXT Computer, whose pricey, cube-shaped computer workstations never caught on with consumers.

Jobs had more success when he bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas before the company made it big with "Toy Story." Jobs brought the same marketing skill to Pixar that he became known for at Apple. His brief but emotional pitch for "Finding Nemo," for example, was a masterful bit of succinct storytelling.

In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, returning Jobs to the then-struggling company he had co-founded. Within a year, he was running Apple again -- older and perhaps wiser but no less of a perfectionist. And in 2001, he took the stage to introduce the original iPod, the little white device that transformed portable music and kick-started Apple's furious comeback.

Thus began one of the most remarkable second acts in the history of business. Over the next decade, Jobs wowed launch-event audiences, and consumers, with one game-changing hit after another: iTunes (2003), the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and the iPad (2010).

Observers marveled at Jobs' skills as a pitchman, his ability to inspire godlike devotion among Apple "fanboys" (and scorn from PC fans) and his "one more thing" surprise announcements. Time after time, he sold people on a product they didn't know they needed until he invented it. And all this on an official annual salary of $1.

He also built a reputation as a hard-driving, mercurial and sometimes difficult boss who oversaw almost every detail of Apple's products and rejected prototypes that didn't meet his exacting standards.

By the late 2000s, his once-renegade tech company, the David to Microsoft's Goliath, was entrenched at the uppermost tier of American business. Apple now operates more than 300 retail stores in 11 countries. The company has sold more than 275 million iPods, 100 million iPhones and 25 million iPads worldwide.

Jobs' climb to the top was complete in summer 2011, when Apple listed more cash reserves than the U.S. Treasury and even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable company.

But Jobs' health problems sometimes cast a shadow over his company's success. In 2004, he announced to his employees that he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He lost weight and appeared unusually gaunt at keynote speeches to Apple developers, spurring concerns about his health and fluctuations in the company's stock price. One wire service accidentally published Jobs' obituary.

Jobs had a secret liver transplant in 2009 in Tennessee during a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple. He took another medical leave in January this year. Perhaps mindful of his legacy, he cooperated on his first authorized biography, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.

Jobs is survived by his wife of 20 years, Laurene, and four children, including one from a prior relationship.

He always spoke with immense pride about what he and his engineers accomplished at Apple.

"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," he told the Stanford grads in 2005.

"If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. 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."



Statement from President Obama:


"Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.

By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.

By making computers personal and putting the Internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.

The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him."



* * *


Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 ShaniasPowerBooks


Whether we have ever personally used a product by Apple or not, we have all felt Steve Jobs' impact in the arts, culture, science, technology.

In life. Everywhere.

Thank You.



- John -





FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by Matthew Thu Oct 06, 2011 8:56 pm

Who's that in the pic at the end in front of the Apple laptops?

Matthew

Posts : 178
Join date : 2011-08-04
Age : 35
Location : Adelaide, Australia

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Thu Oct 06, 2011 8:58 pm

Shania.

Rehearsing backstage before the UC&P performance.


John - Wink
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by Matthew Thu Oct 06, 2011 9:20 pm

Thought so Smile

The hat kinda hid her face a bit....

Matthew

Posts : 178
Join date : 2011-08-04
Age : 35
Location : Adelaide, Australia

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by Bibi Thu Oct 06, 2011 9:27 pm

RIP Mr. Jobs Sad


I like the monkey toy who is between her laptops Smile hahahah
Bibi
Bibi

Posts : 175
Join date : 2011-08-11
Age : 36
Location : Spain

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by Paul Thu Oct 06, 2011 11:46 pm

This guy really did change the world, people say it too often but this time he did. I woke up this morning to my alarm on my i-phone, the very start of my day influenced by him. I drove to school with my i-pod music on. This man changed the world and for the better. RIP Steve.
Paul
Paul
Admin

Posts : 187
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : England

https://thenewshaniaforums.forumotion.net

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by faithfully Fri Oct 07, 2011 3:34 am

He set a real good example for all to follow Wink
faithfully
faithfully

Posts : 566
Join date : 2011-08-17
Age : 45

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by Tammy Sat Oct 08, 2011 8:59 am

Adam's Apple
Newton's Apple
Steve's Apple....

May he RIP. He truly did change the world!
Tammy
Tammy

Posts : 67
Join date : 2011-08-05
Age : 29
Location : Somewhere over the rainbow

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by eilleen333 Thu Oct 13, 2011 4:14 am

Thirty years ago we had Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash and Bob Hope. Now... We have no jobs, no cash and no hope...

He did change the world (especially since there is this huge blackberry error thing in Holland, but my Iphone is still working like a boob!)
If I could I would marry my Iphone. I mean, it can do pretty much everything a man can do and more Wink . And it can multitask...
I think this man invented such great items. A true loss...

eilleen333

Posts : 25
Join date : 2011-08-23
Age : 35
Location : The Netherlands

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Tue Oct 25, 2011 1:10 am

Got the bio book released today - one mighty brick of info to go through...

First thing was to go through the pictures... stuff never before seen... he almost seems human...


John - Wink
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Tue Oct 25, 2011 3:08 pm

The New York Times - October 24, 2011


The Biographer’s Dilemma


Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Steve_jobs_bio


By JOE NOCERA


I was halfway through Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs when I suddenly went searching through my bookshelf for the book he wrote about Benjamin Franklin. I had read the latter biography when it came out in 2003, and I remembered it fondly. I was trying to figure out why “Steve Jobs,” despite being full of new information about the most compelling businessman of the modern era, was leaving me cold.

It didn’t take long to find the answer. “Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us,” wrote Isaacson early in Chapter One in “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.” Oh, for such a sentence in “Steve Jobs!” Oh, for such an insight.

Let me acknowledge that the task facing Isaacson was daunting. He began his research in early 2009, knowing that Jobs had cancer and that his time remaining on this earth was likely to be brief. Although many books have been written about Jobs, Isaacson was the first writer the Apple co-founder had ever cooperated with. (Indeed, it was Jobs who approached Isaacson about writing his biography.) They spoke more than 40 times, about all aspects of Jobs’s life — including his personal life, which he had always guarded fiercely.

Combine that with the enormity of Jobs’s accomplishments — from starting the personal computer industry in his garage to creating a half-dozen of the most iconic consumer products ever invented — and it’s practically a miracle that Isaacson’s book was published as quickly as it was. (The official publication date was Monday.)

Its 627 pages is, indeed, chock full of revelations, from Jobs’s difficult relationship with a daughter he fathered in his early 20s — and then abandoned for years — to the lessons he learned from his adoptive father, whom he adored. We go behind the scenes during the boardroom battle that forced Jobs out of Apple in 1985 — as well as the one that brought him back a decade later.

“Steve Jobs” offers so many examples of his awful behavior — incorrigible bullying, belittling and lying — that you’re soon numb to them. Isaacson gives us the back story of all of Jobs’s creations, from the Apple II to the iPad. His descriptions of the more recent products — iPod to iPhone to iPad — have a flat, rushed quality, as if the author was racing to finish before his subject died. Chances are, he was.

That there is such a hunger for information about this most private of men is undeniable; that’s why the book went to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-sellers list practically the moment Jobs died. But facts alone — even previously unknown facts — do not, by themselves, make for great biographies. What is required for that is genuine insight. And that is where “Steve Jobs” falls down.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the bond that developed between subject and writer made it nearly impossible for Isaacson to get the kind of critical distance he needed to take his subject’s true measure. He didn’t just interview Jobs; he watched him die. There is a moving scene near the end of the book, with an emaciated Jobs, lying in bed, leafing through photographs with Isaacson, reminiscing. How can one possibly get critical distance about your subject when such moments are part of your experience of him?

“I think there will be a lot in your book that I won’t like,” Jobs tells Isaacson during that conversation, two months before he died. Isaacson agrees, but I don’t. Jobs’s bad behavior is something he never denied. He rationalized it as his way out of getting the most out of people — and Isaacson largely accepts this rationalization. An alternative notion — that Jobs was an emotional child his whole life — is something the readers have to come to themselves, by reading between the lines.

When you think about it, it is rare for a truly great biography to be written about someone who is living; in my lifetime, the only one I can think of is “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses. When the subjects are alive — and Jobs was still alive when this book was finished — biographers always feel them looking over their shoulders, and pushing back. Jobs does that often with Isaacson, rejecting, for instance, the idea that his own abandonment by his natural parents had a major effect on him. Invariably, at such moments, Isaacson backs off and gives Jobs the last word.

There is another kind of distance biographies of the living lack — the distance of time. It can take decades to truly understand the context in which the subject’s life and achievements played out. Often we need to see what happens after he is gone to realize his true impact on our world. Steve Jobs has been dead for three weeks. We’re not even close to that understanding.

In “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson has recounted a life — a big, sprawling, amazing life. It is a serious accomplishment. What remains for future biographers is to make sense of that life.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/opinion/nocera-the-biographers-dilemma.html



Steve Jobs is the authorized biography of Steve Jobs. The biography is written at the request of Jobs by acclaimed biographer Walter Isaacson, a former executive at CNN and Time who has written best-selling biographies about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—in addition to interviews with more than one hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Isaacson was given "exclusive and unprecedented" access to Jobs's life.

Jobs is said to have encouraged the people interviewed to speak honestly. Although Jobs cooperated with the book, he asked for no control over its content and waived the right to read it before it was published.




John - Wink
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Wed Oct 26, 2011 8:47 pm

Time.com - 25 October, 2010


10 Biography Excerpts That Portray a Passionate, Intense Visionary


By Terri Pous and Nick Carbone


It's nearly impossible to shrink down Steve Jobs's legacy into mere sentences, but Walter Isaacson's comprehensive biography of the Apple chief somehow manages to do so in 571 pages. Isaacson (TIME's former managing editor) weaves together the story of a brilliant but heady, innovative but volatile leader. Here are Isaacson's 10 best brushstrokes in his painting of Steve Jobs.


On Persuasion

"It was not merely intelligence that [Jobs's fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Hill] saw. Years later she liked to show off a picture of that year's class on Hawaii Day. Jobs has shown up without the suggested Hawaiian shirt, but in the picture he is front and center wearing one. He had, literally, been able to talk the shirt off another kid's back."


On Personality

"Jobs's craziness was of the cultivated sort. [...] He learned to stare at people without blinking, and he perfected long silences punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking. This odd mix of intensity and aloofness, combined with his shoulder-length hair and scraggly beard, gave him the aura of a crazed shaman. He oscillated between charismatic and creepy."


On Criticism

"Jobs did not wear his growing responsibilities gracefully. He had always been temperamental and bratty. At Atari his behavior had caused him to be banished to the night shift, but at Apple that was not possible. 'He became increasingly tyrannical and sharp in his criticism,' according to [Apple's first chairman Mike] Markkula. 'He would tell people, ‘That design looks like s--t.'”


On Efficiency

"Jobs had been referring to computers as a bicycle for the mind; the ability of humans to create a bicycle allowed them to move more efficiently than even a condor, and likewise the ability to create computers would multiply the efficiency of their minds. So one day Jobs decreed that henceforth the Macintosh should be known instead as the Bicycle. This did not go over well."


On Independence

"Another of Jobs's maxims […] was 'It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy.' He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them behave like swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing to commandeer from others."


On Distinction

"Ever since he left the Apple commune, Jobs had defined himself, and by extension Apple, as a child of the counterculture. [...] 'Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,' Larry Ellison said. 'There are cars people are proud to have — Porsche, Ferrari, Prius — because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product.'"


On Cohesiveness

"The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its manufacturing was illustrated for Jobs and [Apple's chief designer Jony] Ive when they were traveling in France and went into a kitchen supply store. Ive picked up a knife he admired, but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same. 'We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade,' Ive recalled. They talked about how the knife's good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured."


On Selectivity

"When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a special sneak preview...He wanted to give TIME the exclusive, 'but there's nobody smart enough at TIME to write it, so I'm going to give it to someone else.'" (The article indeed ended up being written by TIME's Lev Grossman).


On Taste

"He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible."


On Leadership

“'I'm disappointed in Obama,' he said. 'He's having trouble leading because he's reluctant to offend people or piss them off.' He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: 'Yes, that's not a problem I ever had.'"




John - Wink


FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Thu Oct 27, 2011 11:42 pm

Just watched Walter Isaacson interviewed by Piers Morgan on CNN, on the topic "Who Was the Real Steve Jobs?"

Jobs saw the publisher's suggestion for the book cover

ISAACSON: I got chewed out -- I mean the one time I really got chewed out is because he said, I'm going to have no control over this book. I'm not going to read it, said, I don't want it to feel like an in-house book. I don't want it to -- you know, you're going to put things in there, I'm not going to like but that's good because it's not going to feel like some commissioned in-house book.

But then there was the cover design that my publisher put out in the catalog. He looked at it and said in very short, snippy words, that it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. And -- you know, and he had some merit to it.

And after yelling at me for a while, I'm holding the phone like this [at a distance], he says, I'm not going to keep cooperating unless you allow me to have some input into the cover. I thought for maybe one second or one and a half seconds, I said, sure. I mean a guy with a great design eye. But I saw that sort of artistic passion.

MORGAN: I mean he's a very clean Apple-style cover.

ISAACSON: And now we spent a lot --

MORGAN: If you were designing a book cover for the boss of Apple, it would be that. Lots of --

ISAACSON: And I will not show you the one we designed before that because it just shows how bad we were at designs.

MORGAN: And he was right, you think?

ISAACSON: You just said so.

MORGAN: Yes.

ISAACSON: Yes.

MORGAN: I mean I like that cover.

ISAACSON: Yes.

MORGAN: To me it instantly grabs you. It's like one of his products.

ISAACSON: It's just like an Apple product.



Read the entire transcript here: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/ ... mt.01.html


John - Wink
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Mon Oct 31, 2011 11:21 pm

The New York Times - October 30, 2011


A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs


Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Stevejobsetu3110LL_ul


By MONA SIMPSON


Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.


I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.





http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq=mona simpson&st=cse&scp=1



John
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Mon Oct 31, 2011 11:51 pm

The New York Times - October 29, 2011


The Genius of Jobs


Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 30JOBS-articleInline


By WALTER ISAACSON


ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.

But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune.

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead ... Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories, namely that there is no such thing as absolute time and that gravity is a warping of the fabric of space-time. (O.K., it’s not that simple, but that’s why he was Einstein and we’re not.)

Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobs’s ads said, to Think Different.) Although he was not particularly religious, Einstein described this intuitive genius as the ability to read the mind of God. When assessing a theory, he would ask himself, Is this the way that God would design the universe? And he expressed his discomfort with quantum mechanics, which is based on the idea that probability plays a governing role in the universe by declaring that he could not believe God would play dice. (At one physics conference, Niels Bohr was prompted to urge Einstein to quit telling God what to do.)

Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were developing.

Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.

In the world of invention and innovation, that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology, poetry to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.

In the annals of ingenuity, new ideas are only part of the equation. Genius requires execution. When others produced boxy computers with intimidating interfaces that confronted users with unfriendly green prompts that said things like “C:\>,” Mr. Jobs saw there was a market for an interface like a sunny playroom. Hence, the Macintosh. Sure, Xerox came up with the graphical desktop metaphor, but the personal computer it built was a flop and it did not spark the home computer revolution. Between conception and creation, T. S. Eliot observed, there falls the shadow.

In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most profound thinker — that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But he was ingenious.

This depended, in part, on his ability to intuit the relationships between different things. When he invented the battery, he experimented with it to produce sparks that he and his friends used to kill a turkey for their end of season feast. In his journal, he recorded all the similarities between such sparks and lightning during a thunderstorm, then declared “Let the experiment be made.” So he flew a kite in the rain, drew electricity from the heavens, and ended up inventing the lightning rod. Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.

China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/steve-jobss-genius.html?pagewanted=1&ref=opinion



John - Wink
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by FinnFreak Tue Nov 01, 2011 1:49 am

"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 result that makes our heart sing and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices."

- Steve Jobs




John - Wink
FinnFreak
FinnFreak

Posts : 247
Join date : 2011-08-04
Location : Vaasa, Finland

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by faithfully Thu Nov 10, 2011 7:01 pm

Cheers for the MacPro cheers Hope the heads at Apple continue your designs and visions for the future.
faithfully
faithfully

Posts : 566
Join date : 2011-08-17
Age : 45

Back to top Go down

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 Empty Re: Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Post by Sponsored content


Sponsored content


Back to top Go down

Back to top

- Similar topics

 :: Miscellaneous :: News

 
Permissions in this forum:
You cannot reply to topics in this forum