Steve Jobs

It's as though he had been a head of state,or a crowned monarch. The death a few days ago of the co-founder of the Apple empire has generated more comment and commemorative paragraphs of poor prose than any other death since Princess Di's untimely and messy departure from this life. How many of the innovative products of Apple Macintosh were actually his brain-children is not clear to me. I came late to the world of Macintosh, Apple computers, iPhone, iPad, i-this, i-that; indeed the only Apple product I possess is the MacBook Pro laptop on which I'm pecking out this post. But I do love this elegant little laptop, which is far superior to the PC products I've stuck to for the past quarter century or more. It's actually a sensual pleasure to use it, whereas there was always an adversarial relationship between me and the succession of PCs I worked with - or against. Another thing I'm aware of is the elegant design of the Mac, the pleasurable way it does what I want it to do (most of the time anyway; it's my own fault, not the laptop's, that I have trouble operating the track pad occasionally). It's so elegant! Consider the way the power cord attaches when I need to recharge batteries. A magnet! Why didn't IBM or Microsoft think of that? I understand the magnet, like the aesthetically pleasing appearance of all the Apple products, was Steve Jobs' idea. Yet he was a software designer by profession, a dropout withal, but a genius nonetheless. I suppose he merits the many accolades he's attracted, perhaps even the "stop the presses" actions of Time magazine, which pulled its current cover and many inside pages in production to replace these with a fulsome eulogy. But I'm sure we will see his like again. Probably Apple has a dozen clones of Steve Jobs already on board.