On October 5th, Steve Jobs died. The company and the fans have survived the following one hundred forty-two days well. I remember on October 4th, on the day of the iPhone 4S reveal, some comments I made with some friends at the University of Minnesota.
It was in my calculus class and a friend was attempting to put some holes in a story written by the MN Daily newspaper. He needed to look up numbers on the population of Minnesota and other such facts that were only easily findable on the Internet. The guy behind us handed us a black iPhone 4, and I casually remarked that there’s a keynote today and we exclaimed our excitement. My friend took the iPhone and I opened the WolframAlpha website in Mobile Safari. He used it for a couple minutes but then he needed something else, and he began to search in the address bar. He whispered to me that there was no space bar key, and he didn’t know what he was really doing with it. I said, “if Steve Jobs saw you struggling with that iPhone, he’d probably die.”
Later that night, I was displeased with the lackluster keynote on the best selling iPhone in history. The next day was normal until six in the evening. It was first in my feeds and I confirmed with multiplicity and the Apple website. The night was awash with emotion, losing someone you remotely knew but were quite fond of. Losing a key piece of what you thought was right, but not in the sense of right and wrong, but in the sense of right in a beautiful mathematical equation.
It has been 142 days since Steve died. This morning, I finished the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson. It was a decent book, but I think there will be others that end up being better. I felt it lacked focus on the more recent of events that have set the company up for the best years.
Happy 57th, Steve.
