53 Replies to “RIP Steve Jobs”

  1. Thanks to your efforts, talent, genius and tenacity, you left the world a better place than where you found it. God bless and rest in peace.

  3. I recall not being able to afford a Mac waythehellago, now I can, and have two. The switch to Intel processors enabled users to dual-boot into Windows and the adoption of Linux/UNIX as the base operating system was a great decision.
    Agreed, Bull, RIP Steve Jobs. Definitely more of a “visionary” than a techie compared to Wozniak, but an incredibly important mind nonetheless.

  5. rabbit, eat your shorts.
    While I’m not personally an apple fanboy (and find a lot of them, frankly, elitist), our society has lost a truly visionary citizen of our times, who not only was successful once (Apple V1.0), not twice (PIXAR), but three times (Apple V2.0).
    Sure, he was egotistical and somewhat vain, especially in his youth (who isn’t), but Steve Jobs established a huge legacy that few can emulate, let alone follow.

  6. Here’s to a genuine entrepreneur and trailblazer, who created meaningful employment to thousands and improved the lives of countless millions.
    Godspeed Mr. Jobs, and thank you.

  7. A great visionary entrepreueur, RIP Mr. Jobs.
    BUT I keep wondering how beneficial all this stuff is: iPods, iPads, iPhones, iTunes, etc. Isn’t a great deal of the utility simply frivolous. And what about out-of-control device-addiction now afflicting a great swath of humanity?
    I dunno. I’m no luddite but I’m taking a pretty dark view of all this crap as I look around me.
    For one thing: you can no longer spot the schizophrenics!!!

  8. I find the assertion that computers being overrated as quite asinine. Nothing has been more transformative in the last few decades than communication, facilitated with computers. Apple was a big part of that in the early years of personal computing and the later years with the iPhone. Both eras have Steve Jobs in common. The proof is this blog which we all love. And correct me if I am wrong but Kate makes it possible on a Mac.

  9. He was the Alexander Graham Bell of the personal digital innovation. Not a bad epitaph for a nerdy kid working out of a family garage. I don’t recall Steve or Woz marching for their “entitlements”.
    Hopefully his ideas and spirit will not be lost. RIP

  10. Well he is in either heavan or hell plain and simple i hope for the former rather than the later he did good thing’s.
    On a side note china made an OBAMA FRIED CHICKEN …..LMAO!!!

  12. I changed to a Mac after a bad experience with Dell and never looked back. I was also a luddite til I discovered digital photography. It has changed my life for the better and what more can you ask for. Rest in Peace.

  13. The iThings that Jobs shepparded to the market are technological wonders of today.
    One can only hope that there will not be unintended consequence as thing move on.

  14. It was BSD, not GNU/Linux, which NeXtStep was based upon. Furthermore, I don’t know of any BSD variants that are UNIX certified. OSX was largely made from NeXt, and has almost nothing in common with previous versions of MacOS.
    RIP Steve Jobs. He died young. On a tangent, the best decisions his unwed, college student mother ever made were giving birth to him (rather than killing him) and giving him up to be raised by a proper family.

  15. The best thing about computers is that it now takes 3 times longer to pay for merchandise than with cash. and you can still get robbed (electronically). we’ve come a long way. sarc
    mike

  16. I’m posting this on a MacBook Air. I switched to an iMac after getting supremely fed up with PCs and haven’t looked back. And I love my recently purchased iPad. Jobs was a true visionary who created excellent products. RIP.

  17. Personally not a fan at all of Apple products. I find them too overpriced and locked down for my tastes. However, there is no denying that this man was a genius and quite the innovator. All of the other computer/mobile/electronic manufacturers followed his lead. I’m wondering if there will be a stagnant period in tech innovations now.

  18. I compare a man such as Steve Jobs and all that he accomplished with Jack Layton. One who professed to help, to make things better with one who created millions of jobs directly and indirectly. Jobs created wealth with his vision, lifted people out of poverty by creating employment. This is a man who deserves the misplaced praises that Layton received.

  20. Robert w: you’re welcome. I had a similar experience the first time I read it. I remember an even more profound comment that was linked to the article saying in effect that success is always fleeting – that everything fails or dies eventually. Nothing is “too big to fail”. But it is the quest for success in life – whatever that may be – that is what gives it meaning that keeps humanity going.
    Jobs may have passed, but he moved the world forward a phenomenal distance for the relatively brief time he was here.

  21. Steve Jobs was a genius and an entrepreneur.
    America needs more of his calibre for it to thrive and overcome the bureaucratic morass that fetters it now.

  22. yeah Mike…..
    I especially love waiting in line behind those little old ladies, as they dig into their purse, AFTER they have been told how much they have to pay, and get their pennies, one by one, to pay for their items.
    At lightning speed, of course!
    /sarc

  23. Great Moments in Computing Wisdom:
    “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” [Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM in 1943]
    “There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.” [Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corp, in 1977]
    “No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.” [Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, in 1981]
    “He was overrated. Computers are a fad.”
    Posted by: rabbit at October 5, 2011 9:38 PM
    mhb23re

  26. IMHO rabbit was aiming for a chuckle. But thanks mhb for the list of experts that have been proven so wrong, to a large extent because of Jobs’ efforts.

  28. Steve was a hero of mine even though I have never brought an Apple product. He was a technical genius as well as a masterful marketeer. He will be greatly missed.
    It all started with this:
    The Apple 1 Computer

  29. My 2 cents for what it’s worth…
    Steve Jobs; smart and innovative without a doubt.
    I love my mac products (have them all), but refuse to drink to kool-aid. I want to be able to shop and price compare for my apps at the J-store, B-store, Bob’s Apps for Less, etc. rather than jailbreak my devices (guilty!). I want a choice. Until then, Apple is monopolistic (but most Mac koolaid folks don’t understand reality).

  30. Here’s an interesting story, written just before the release of the original IPhone. Dvorak was a columnist for years at PCMAG, who often wrote ‘on the money’ critique’s on high tech companies.
    Colossal fail though, here. The Irony is -thick-
    John Dvorak’s Second Opinion Archives
    March 28, 2007, 7:18 p.m. EDT
    Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone
    Commentary: Company risks its reputation in competitive business
    “It’s the loyalists who keep promoting this device as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market.”
    “The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.
    There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.”
    “What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a “reference design” and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.
    It should do that immediately before it’s too late. Samsung Electronics Ltd. might be a candidate. Otherwise I’d advise you to cover your eyes. You’re not going to like what you’ll see.”

  31. I always thought he was an arrogant jerk, along with most of the people who bought his products.
    But I never wished him any ill will, and I’m sorry to hear about his passing. His company and its products are truly first-rate, and their competitors have (in recent years) eaten Apple’s dust and tried to keep pace. Without Apple, PCs would have evolved at an even slower glacial pace and prices would have been much higher.
    Like it or not, we got cheap PCs because Apples were so damned good.
    Maybe now we’ll see Adobe Flash on Macbooks, and then I’ll buy one.

  32. Sad day for the computer world. I disagreed with a lot of Steve Jobs decisions after the Mac came out, but there’s no question that the Mac user interface changed the world of computing. Yes, Xerox PARC was the inventor of the GUI, but Apple made it happen for everyone’s use and it was the equivalent of finalizing motor vehicle design so that all the controls were in the same place. I fired up my MacPlus last summer and the GUI was the same as on my PowerPC based Mac.
    The first Mac was mindblowing as it finally convinced me to switch from what I considered to be the worlds perfect computer, the PDP-11, to a totally new platform. The 68000 chip was actually based on the PDP-11 and addressed bytes in proper order unlike Intel’s abominable byte addressing scheme. Initially Apple documented the insides of their machines in considerable detail and I still have the hefty volumes of Inside MacIntosh and GUI programming was a very pleasant part of my past.
    Unfortunately all that changed when Steve Jobs killed the Newton and rumor has it that it was a deal with M$ where Apple wouldn’t develop tablet PC’s and left this to M$ who has totally botched pen-windows. This deal was in exchange for bailing out Apple financially in the 1990’s. Since that time Apple products have become more and more closed and what turned me off Macs was when they went from a PowerPC processor to Intel 80×86 chips. Now they’re going to ARM based CPU’s primarily to cut costs.
    Still for a guy who started out working with Steve Wozniak in a garage in the 1970’s, Jobs had a major role in how computers developed and was one of the few people still playing a major role today. Bill Gates is the other one but I’ve always disliked M$ and consider my 1987 version of Word, which I now run on an emulated MacII using BasiliskII, to be quite a bit superior to their latest piece of bloatware. The early Mac, despite major design flaws such as no DMA for disk I/O, was the last generation of computers to display programming elegance.

  33. POWinCA,
    Flash is on Macbooks. The two devices it is not are the ipad and iphone. All of Mac’s PC’s (e.g. comps with keyboards, play flash)

  34. RIP Jobs…That said:
    -Jobs was worth 5 Billion…I’ve seen placards from those “occupy Wall st.” mobs that says “Eat the Rich”…”Make them pay” etc…
    Hey kids does that also include Steve Jobs? Or is he too cool and thus exempt?
    We all know you would stone to death any oil and gas CEO in a flash but remember: No fossil fuel, no computers possible.
    I’M WITH ME NO DHIMMI AT 9:52 PM:
    Technology is fine as long as it’s not detrimental to humanity. Right now it’s an addiction that is dehumanizing and dumbing down. It is literally an epidemic too.
    Things should get better eventually as it is now a fad and thus not necessarely the ground breaking tools people tend to say about them…Treated like toys for entertainment more than anything right now , not unlike RABBIT said actually.
    Case in point:
    Last year I attended a seminar; the median age was between 19 to 35 years old. I was 51. A question came up: “If you could take just one thing (Anything) on a deserted island, what would it be?”
    Believe it or not, the group of about 30 persons, except for one that said her cat, everyone else except me said some inanimate object with the vast majority being electronic gadget or another. Phones and Ipads mostly.
    I said I would bring my wife…The host looked at me and I could sense he knew how sick this materialistic world had become.
    The novelty side of these gadgets will eventually wear off.

  35. On this plane of human existence Steve Jobs was a genious.
    My best wish for Jobs, is that he reconnected with his birth Mother and had been baptised into the “christ” principle.
    That’s wherein lies the real truth, eh?
    My first Mac was an SE30 bought in 1990 – 4 MEG Ram – 40 MEG hardrdive – $5,500.00 Canadian, in London Ontario.

  36. “He was overrated. Computers are a fad”
    I think it’s called satire folks.
    What I most appreciated about Jobs was his passion for good industrial design.

  37. Not a huge apple fan (way overpriced products) but Jobs was far more intelligent than Gates.
    However the “icon” claims are perhaps a bit overdone.

  38. Just read in Wpg Sun,that the freaks from Westboro Baptist ‘church’ will be picketing Job’s funeral.

  39. @Loki
    Back in the day I worked with a Digital PDP 11-45, so I appreciate your comments. Yes the real innovation for Apple at the start was usage of the Motorola 68000 processors. After that it was taking and refining other innovations and locking them to Apple proprietary software. For example the initial iPod was simply a next generation Walkman, and instead of MP3 file format, you use Apple’s format, source you songs from iTunes, a for profit model of Napster. Jobs built better mousetraps, and marketed them better than competitors, using himself in a cult of personality method. Unfortunately it is that linkage that could be problematic for Apple from here on. Now any new product from Apple will have to stand on its own merits.

  40. I abhor Jobs’ fascistic computing vision and take pleasure in challenging the Mac cultists notion of freedom through control.
    But there’s no denying Jobs was a genius marketer. How else does one explain the fact that so many ‘conservatives’ embrace and exult in his vision of absolute control?
    I mean, just look at this comment thread….

  41. By placing computer power and connectivity into the hands of ordinary people just about everywhere, it would not be an exaggeration to state that Steve Jobs and the much-maligned Bill Gates have probably done more to advance and improve the lot of mankind than most of what passes for our political “leadership”.
    And they did it without bankrupting any national treasuries. Far from it: they enriched national treasuries, created vast numbers of jobs in industries that never existed before and offered previously unheard of opportunities for self-betterment to anyone in any country who could simply log on to a computer.
    Quite a legacy indeed!
    R.I.P., Steve.

  42. Let’s not deify this guy. It strikes me that Jobs was a bit of a prick – not a generous guy – the sort of guy that if his employees went out to dinner with him, he’d either insist on splitting the bill with his minions, or he’d disappear to the washroom when the bill arrived. He was not known as a philanthropist, by any stretch. Even in his adopted “hometown” (see,the Friends of Jackling House website and) Jobs waged a decade long battle with the locals to destroy an historic home in Woodside Calif. – leaving a nice “keepsake memory” for the locals to have of him. Also, his denial of paternity of his first daughter, stating he was “sterile” etc. in court proceedings, while her mom was on welfare, stands his memory well. I heard his “friend” Andy Heller (former IBM exec.) being interviewed on CBC (ok, ok, somebody else was listening to this crap, and I overheard) and it seemed all of Heller’s memories were of Jobs visiting Heller at Heller’s home, not the other way round. I don’t think a lot of tears are being shed for Jobs “the humanitarian” – but maybe he will be reincarnated as one?

  43. “I abhor Jobs’ fascistic computing vision and take pleasure in challenging the Mac cultists notion of freedom through control.
    But there’s no denying Jobs was a genius marketer. How else does one explain the fact that so many ‘conservatives’ embrace and exult in his vision of absolute control?
    I mean, just look at this comment thread….”
    Exactly!!! Very well said Mark. And most people would be surprised to discover how simple and unimaginative the engineering is inside most Apple products. But when you have a cult following, you can charge big prices, and make huge profits.
    Apple != freedom.

  45. You guys aren’t kidding,
    Obama’s new bill really does kill Jobs!
    Hey-ooooooooooooooooooooo

  46. Me No Dhimmi: “For one thing: you can no longer spot the schizophrenics!!!”
    So true!
    Walking down the street, I swear everyone under 35 was born with a coffee cup in one hand and a cell/i-phone in the other.
    Though all of this “stuff” has made collecting information and contacting others every second of every day and night easier, has it heightened our ability at communicating with one another?
    I felt inexplicably sad when I heard that Steve Jobs had died, probably because I recognize that he’s some type of genius (despite the fact that I don’t have a Mac or any i-stuff) and that he died too young. I feel badly for his family.

  47. So, he
    a) Was a self-made capitalist.
    b) Dropped out of college to save his parents’ money (instead of whining about the necessity of being there).
    c) Probably wouldn’t have been born today given your typical grad student’s attitude toward abortion.
    d) Is a hero of leftist types all over North America.
    One of these things is not like the others.

  48. I am one of the few people who can say they worked on a Xerox Star and an Apple Lisa. In both cases, the experience was tremendous.
    Xerox had the technology, but they lacked the drive. Jobs pushed it when no one else would. That, in and of itself, is worth everything.
    He made a lot of things better. I hope, when my time comes, people will say as much about me.

  49. TJ: “but Jobs was far more intelligent than Gates.”
    I beg to differ. Gates was as much a visionary as Jobs. Sure he dropped the ball times like the ram or internet issue, but when he saw his mistake, he changed things to the fact that MSIE is still the top dog in browser usage today.
    Proof in pudding when Bill copied Apple’s GUI, Jobs went ballistic and Bill said not to worry, he’d give his grandmother a mac. Jobs was egotistical and Bill used to to his advantage.
    As well, when Bill teamed up with IBM he said he wanted to keep the rights to the software, elsewise we’d be using PC-DOS instead.
    Bottom line, how much has Jobs given monetarily?

  50. “Bottom line, how much has Jobs given monetarily?”
    Wrong.
    Bottom line: how much good old-fashioned, grubby old wealth in the form of profit, dividends, investement, employment and (lest we forget) tax revenue has Jobs created?

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