Right after it was announced Steve Jobs passed away, the Apple Store at the Rideau Centre became an impromptu memorial to his legacy. It started with one post-it note, then two, three… and now the entire glass door that separates the two entrances is covered with little notes, some witty or empathic, written in different languages.
There is no denying that Steve Jobs had a vision but I must admit I was surprised by people’s reaction—I wasn’t expecting the founder of a brand to have such a following. The Apple brand seems to have a near-religion status. Steve Jobs was an inventor, but he was also skilled at marketing products to a generation that identifies itself with them. I guess it worked.
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It was very touching to see this enormous sadness of many people.
It is like millions of people had lost their Dad. Because the objects that Mr Jobs created were the most important ones to them everyday.
The world has lost a genius – RIP Mr. Jobs.
It was touching, I agree, but surprising at the same time. I’ve rarely seen this kind of worldwide mourning.
In my humble opinion, Jobs was a great marketer but not so much of an inventor.
I tend to agree with you…
I think those of us who have used Apple products since way back when have always been a bit fanatical about Apple – and Steve Jobs. He will be missed.
But I think most “kids” who mourned him are new followers, since the iPod anyway. I still remember my parents’ first Mac in the 1990s!
Apple has this cult status for a reason — it’s a company that has always been different. Microsoft was the dominant force, especially in business, and Apple was the underdog who appealed to the entrepreneurs and the design crowd. There are a couple of generations of “Mac Heads” all over the world.
I worked directly with a Mac Head who tried to convert me for YEARS from Windows machines, and every time he would say something I would roll my eyes. I’m not a gadget collector and I simply couldn’t believe it was worth the extra money for these computers.
Until 2004 when I bought my first Apple product. It was a 17″ PowerBook G4 laptop. It was silver, sleek, and really impressive-looking, but more importantly it’s been a heavy-duty workhorse all these years, running a ridiculous number of programs intensively. I hardly ever turned it off, yet the fans never died and aside from adding RAM when I bought it and replacing the hard drive a couple of years ago, I haven’t done anything to upgrade it. I still have it and use it, which is amazing by today’s standards. Yes, it was expensive, but for seven years of heavy use (thus far), it’s gone far and above the call of duty.
I’m definitely not a Mac Head “drinking the kool aid” and buying every Apple product under the sun (my total Apple purchases in 7 years are two computers; the rest I have are gifts), nor did I ever worship at the altar of Steve Jobs, but I respected him greatly for his love of design and simplicity. And not only did Apple products stand out in the world of ugly putty-coloured computer monitors (remember those?), but I wasn’t crashing all the time, installing drivers all the time, cluttering my hard drive with residual files after trying to uninstall a program, or getting bogged down with constant virus scanning. Using a computer was less frustrating and more enjoyable.
That’s my main point: I think Steve Jobs had a loyal following partly because he took an ordinary computer user experience and turned it something people would actually rave about. I never really considered him an inventor per se, but a guy who could actually get people excited about tech gadgets and get excited about using them. There really was no one who could do that like he could.
I agree with you, he made Apple “sexy” (and that’s fairly new because in the 1990s, Apple were only adopted by a few fans). This is not to say Apple products aren’t good. My father is an Apple guy and I’ve used both PC and Mac. I agree that Mac are powerful machines, a bit out of my price range though and I do not need one. Most kids I know who use a Macbook bought it because it looked cool but they only use it for browsing the web, which is a bit of a waste in my opinion.
Steve Jobs made great contribution to human kind. His invention not only provide us great convenience, made our lives more fun but also a revolution to a new technology world.
I agree but at the same time, I was surprised to see how popular he was.