Sue Halpern, writing for the The New York Review of Books, dug into two movies (Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine and Sorkin’s Steve Jobs) and a book (Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader) to explore Steve Jobs’ legacy.
On the outpouring of grief:
Yet if the making of popular consumer goods was driving this outpouring of grief, then why hadn’t it happened before? Why didn’t people sob in the streets when George Eastman or Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell died—especially since these men, unlike Steve Jobs, actually invented the cameras, electric lights, and telephones that became the ubiquitous and essential artifacts of modern life?* The difference, suggests the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, is that people’s feelings about Steve Jobs had less to do with the man, and less to do with the products themselves, and everything to do with the relationship between those products and their owners, a relationship so immediate and elemental that it elided the boundaries between them. “Jobs was making the computer an extension of yourself,” Turkle tells Gibney. “It wasn’t just for you, it was you.”
The outpouring of grief for Steve Jobs was palpable, widespread, and (in my opinion) genuine. By comparison (this in the footnote at the bottom of the article):
When Bell died, every phone exchange in the United States was shut down for a moment of silence. When Edison died, President Hoover turned off the White House lights for a minute and encouraged others to do so as well.
An interesting read. Halpern does a solid job weaving through the elements that make up Steve Jobs’ lasting legacy.
George Eastman stayed in the background, made a fortune, and was widely remembered as a successful capitalist. Edison ran an invention factory and took credit for everything that came out of Menlo Park. He also fought many public controversial battles regarding electricity (Tesla anyone?).
Bell’s invention was the outfggroth of his interest in the field of deafness.
Also, when these inventors passed, we didn’t have the sophisticated mass media we do today
“This past year saw the launch of the much-anticipated Apple Watch, which failed to generate consumer enthusiasm. Sales dropped 90 percent in the first week and continued to disappoint for the rest of the year. The company also released the iPad Pro, a larger, more powerful iPad, and it, too, did not fare well.” Great to see the New York Review of Books doesn’t have to provide, you know, proof of the things they claim. Makes writing so much easier.
I found the article to be quite biased against Jobs and Apple, and selective in the information it presented, without any questioning of WHO thinks various things and whether they are qualified to do so. I suppose as a review (opinion piece) that’s acceptable, but it’s sad.
The three things that really bothered me were:
1) “even after sending most of Apple’s cash offshore to avoid paying taxes” shows a complete misunderstanding of where Apple’s offshore cash came from. (It’s profits earned offshore and not brought to the US – to avoid paying additional taxes on it, true. But the statement that it was sent offshore is incorrect, and is one of the things that distinguishes Apple from the other large companies with large cash balances offshore.)
2) “the inhumane conditions in Apple’s production facilities in China—where there had been dozens of suicides—as well as Jobs’s halfhearted response to them.” They’re not Apple’s facilities, the suicide rates there were LOWER than the baseline average, and the author has NO IDEA what Jobs’s response was.
3) The title: “The Real Legacy of Steve Jobs”.