On January 30, 2010, in a tongue-in-cheek commentary entitled Technology is God. Jobs is Moses. And iPad is His 4th Commandment, I wrote the following:
Technology’s Commandments … (according to Apple):
* Thou shall buy a Mac
* Thou shall buy an iPod
* Thou shall buy an iPhone
* Thou shall buy an iPad…
Somehow I’m managing to get by without obeying any of them.
Then on April 4, 2010, in another entitled Steve Jobs: the P.T. Barnum of the information age, I doubled down on my cynicism as follows:
Like Barnum, Jobs has proved with the launch of the iPad that there’s (still) a sucker born every minute. Are you one of them….?
And finally, just a few months ago (on June 18), in another one entitled The Gospel according to Apple, I testified as follows:
At long last, I’ve been converted. I now have an iPhone. Hallelujah!
These commentaries clearly chronicle my evolution from a Doubting Thomas to a qualified believer in the Maslowian hierarchy of needs Jobs created for the technology age. And to hear everyone from the president of the United States to a barely literate peasant farmer in China singing hosannas to Jobs for his creations, one could be forgiven for thinking that his gadgets are at the same level of fundamental human needs as food and water.
Here, in part, is how President Obama eulogized him just minutes after learning of Jobs’s death on his … iPad:
Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it… He transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.
(Obama, Whitehouse.gov, October 5, 2011)
All the same, I must confess that the deification of Steve Jobs that is now underway is causing me to backslide a little into my informed cynicism.
Because as habit forming (or addictive) as Apple’s products undeniably are, I am loath to subscribe to the notion that they are sufficient to grant Jobs entry into the pantheon of innovators alongside the likes of Johannes Gutenberg (movable type printing), Thomas Edison (phonograph, electric light bulb), and Albert Einstein (general relativity – and don’t worry if you have no clue what it means).
The iPhone is great, but hardly inventive: remember the Blackberry? And after the redundancies of the iPhone 3 and 3GS, did we really need the iPhone 4 and 4GS?
This is why, when all is said and done, I still believe that Jobs was more P.T. Barnum than anything else.
He died on Wednesday after an eight-year battle with cancer. He was 56.
Related commentaries:
Technology is God…
Jobs: P.T. Barnum…
Gospel according to Apple