Time literally does fly; I wrote the following 10 years ago on the day that Jobs passed away from pancreatic cancer. Apple themselves have allowed their main site to be taken over with their annual remembrance of the co-founder (this year with a “Celebrating Steve” short film and a short message from the Jobs family).
With the relentless passage of time, it’s also no surprise that the thing that I mentioned regarding “a little bit of Steve Jobs in every Apple product” at that time, has become a lot more diluted. Apple the company has grown a lot larger (personnel and market capitalization wise) since then. A lot of the product line has seen incremental improvements, but nothing drastically revolutionary and transformative as the introduction of the iPhone was in 2007.
I still do not own an Apple Watch even though it is now at “Series 7” in its iterative design. And my main Mac desktop is still my trusty and tank like reliable 2010 Mac Pro; my newest computer period is an MSI Trident X (again highlighting how I’ve become less tied to the Apple ecosystem). There was a period where I was looking at eventually upgrading to the 2019 Mac Pro (doing the 1 year wait to see how well it pegged the reliability meter). But then the much rumored Apple Silicon was announced in June 2020 with the 2 year transition of the Mac product line to Apple’s own processor chip. Even though I had previously wrote that I would personally not go through another transition of this type, the PC world has also changed (where even Microsoft is considering a further shift towards ARM based systems for their own Windows based hardware products). And that gave me enough pause to take a wait and see approach.
I believe I did guess right that a lot of the ideas that Jobs himself had prior to his passing, have pretty much either been implemented, toned down, or shelved. Product wise, the company has been running on the inertia of the iPhone (and iPad) over the past decade. The company has a lot of bright people but not that “product person” that Steve Jobs was (and could relentlessly pursue the”perfection” of getting that product idea, released). Jobs was only 56 years old when he passed away. He would’ve been a still young 66 years old today (and who knows just what else sort of ideas he would have had over the past decade).
There are parts of me that occasionally wishes there would be a “one more thing” moment during an Apple event, but know realistically the company no longer has someone with Steve Jobs mind where it could visualize ideas as a tangible product (and push engineers to make those ideas come to life). I am grateful and thankful that I did live in the time when all of this was happening (and to have taken a part in it, even if it was just a small part), where Jobs and Apple made this huge dent in the universe.
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