Not
many of us get the opportunity to witness our own funerals. Steve did. When he
announced that he was stepping down as Apple CEO in August, 2011, every news
portal was eulogizing the man as if he had already bought the great data-farm
in the sky. Journos across the globe suddenly forgot how much they hated iTunes
and hammered out misty-eyed pre-death obituaries. They detailed how Steve had
single-handedly carved the PC from a single block of hype, convinced millions
to stop pirating music and start paying for it, delivered a smarter-than-smart
smartphone to the masses… and probably gave us world peace – or, at the very
least a mirage of peace if you wander through his utopian Apple Stores. Not
surprisingly, most of the glowing tributes were written by the “money media”…
Forbes:
Apple became a huge Ferrari responsive to his touch
alone. Like a great conductor, he assembled a vast orchestra of skilled
players who obeyed him with complete fealty. When he tapped the podium,
all noises ceased. Like Solomon, he commanded his minions to undertake
great projects and summoned them to show him the results. [1]
Money.CNN:
Apple's fans flocked to Twitter and other
social-media sites to mark and mourn the CEO
torch-passing. "The end of an era!" one Twitter user wrote, while
another voiced the fears many share: "I pray it's not bc [because] of his
health.” [2]
Wall Street Journal:
The news of Mr. Jobs's
resignation quickly became the talk of the Internet. Overwhelmed with traffic,
the blog Cult of Mac temporary went
offline. "This thing is melting down," said editor Leander Kahney,
about an hour after the news broke on Wednesday. [3]
Fortune:
The tech community tonight experienced its version
of an earthquake. [4]
On the BBC News, Steve-Stalker
and comedian, Stephen Fry, became deadly serious for a moment to talk about the
resignation of his man-crush. He intoned with the gravitas that only the
British are capable of expressing:
I don’t think there’s a
human being on the planet who has been as influential in the last thirty-years
on the way culture developed. I don’t think there is anyone who has proved
quite so conclusively that passion and taste and belief are more important than
a hard bitten business head. [5]
The
first big thing the new Apple CEO Tim Cook did was unveil the latest iPhone. It
would be safe to assume that Apple should have something pretty darn special to
compensate for Steve not taking the stage. You can get away with a great CEO
holding aloft a boring product; but you can’t get away with a boring CEO
holding a boring product.
With
Old Man Steve off the premises, unfortunately it seems that Apple’s engineers
decided that they could goof off and hand in half an assignment. The new iPhone 4S relied upon customers appreciating its inner beauty. On the
outside, it looked no different than the iPhone that Apple chumps had bought
only a year ago. If Tim Cook’s Apple knew anything about the market, they would
realise that their customers prefer that their latest gadget look different
than the last one precisely so they can advertise that they have the latest
one. Applytes need to know that a skyrocketing credit card debt and lining up
for hours outside an Apple Store is worth all the grief. Apple should have at
least stuck some superfluous gizmo on it, or painted it bright magenta –
anything, so long as it looked different from the last iPhone. Apple’s failure
was giving its customers credit enough not to be so shallow. Good luck with
that, Tim.
Apple “didn’t
quite understand how revved up expectations had gotten,” said Frank Gillett, an
analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. Some users
were looking for a more revolutionary iPhone 5, rather than just a faster
iPhone 4, he said . [6]
Months
before the new iPhone, a viral video appeared featuring an iPhone 5 armed with
a holographic keyboard and display.[7] It got everyone excited around the water
cooler at work. This did not help the ridiculously high expectations.
Currently,
there are over twenty Google/Android-loaded smartphones already on the market
that beat the 4S on spec. They have 8MP+ cameras, over 4inches of screen space,
longer battery life, and dual-core CPUs with 1Gig+ processors (Apple A5 chip?
– whatever, Dude).
Google
has recently bought Motorola Mobility– Apple’s arch nemesis in the mobile
arena.[8]
The deal will make mincemeat of the iPhone 4S which has now proven that it was
all sizzle and no steak. Perhaps the “S” in 4S
is a cheeky Apple engineer’s code for “Shortchanged”?
[1] Kay, R (2011, August 25) Apple Without Steve Jobs. Forbes Magazine.
FakeSteveJobs reminisces about his naive trek across India as a teenager. The deluded boy meets a sham guru whose only useful nugget of wisdom is:
“America is all about commerce. Someone is going to figure out a way to create material things and imbue them with a sense of religious significance…. Whoever weaves these together will become more powerful than you can imagine.” [1]
The passage is from Options, the novelised parody of Steve’s life. It speaks volumes more than any official memoir ever could. Dan Lyons’ hilarious satire is as much a pointed comment about Steve as it is about our ravenous consumer culture.
The real Steve grew up to be a man who garnered adjectives from journalists such as ‘messianic’ and ‘evangelical’. The image was his own creation from the very beginning. At the very first Apple Halloween party, he dressed up as Jesus Christ. [2]
In 1966, TIME Magazine's cover posed the question, “Is God Dead”. This is the same year John Lennon joked that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus and caused a protest across America. Two decades later, TIME’s Person of The Year was the personal computer. What does that say about the man who brought us this thing?
In 1882, Nietzsche was also wondering about God. He wrote,
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" [3]
Over a century later, The New York Times reported,
"Mr. Jobs succeeded in building expectations for what some have called “the God machine.” The bar-of-soap-size phone is being coveted as a talisman for a digital age, and iPhone hysteria is beginning to reach levels usually reserved for video-game machines at Christmas".[4]
Urban Dictionary christened Steve's "bar of soap", The Jesus Phone."[5]It followed, of course that the iPad became the Jesus Pad. When Steve stood upon his stage in 2010, and held aloft his newly minted tablet, The Guardian’s design expert, Jonathan Glancey - with tongue firmly planted in his cheek - compared Steve to Moses on the mountain.[6]
Later that year, Steve made a Freudian slip at an iPhone OS 4 Q&A session: “We just shipped it on Saturday. And then we rested on Sunday.” [7]
Just as Jesus gathered disciples around him, Steve has his collection of disciples as well - according to Apple deep-throats who spoke to Fortune Magazine. However, Steve’s disciples number 100 rather than the paltry twelve tallied by the Son of God. The difference is not just that Steve’s posse is bigger. He also reserves the right to replace a disciple if he is found to be lacking in conviction; whereas, Jesus was nice enough to forgive Judas a transgression. [8]
Steve's public seems to be in agreement with his own God-complex. Somewhere out there is a blog called jobsisgod.com. Its welcome page intones:
Welcome to the fold and be assimilated you shall. For all those who believe waits a high and illustrious path of synchronization of the mind, body, and soul with the Ultimate Apple Device envisioned by the omniscient and omnipotent innards of the brain of Jobs.
Yes, Steve Jobs is God! It is he who hath provided us with iPhones which serve us as palm sized minions. It is he who spun the Macbook Pro from aluminum ore. And it is he who hath brought forth the glory of the wondrous iPad. Even though we all share the sin of having tasted Windows and Flash in the past, Steve Jobs forgives us and continues to do what it takes to set us free.[9]
Zdnet argues that Steve is more a demo-god rather than demi-god.[10] The author was referring to his rock-concert keynote speeches in which finishes off with a modified namaste.
Apple’s holier-than-thou marketing became the focus of a BBC series entitled, Secrets of the Super-brands. It was presented by comic host, Alex Riley, who attempted to critique Steve's Eden of consumerism.
Steve would not be too concerned about what this guy has to say about his company anyway. Poor Alex is not his demographic. He fails the Apple test in two key areas: Alex is decidedly uncool (especially his humour), and he watches his budget. Too cheap to buy an iPhone, Alex borrowed one from an affluent friend to demonstrate it on the show.
Alex asks his guests, “If Apple was a person how would u describe him?” A ten year old responds, matter-of-factly, "spoiled, snobby". A Gen-Y’s answer, "The sort of person who might invite you to their birthday party; but then when you get there, you would be doing everything that they wanted to do".
The camera pans across fanboys and gurls inside an Apple Store, fondling Steve’s merchandise, as Diana Ross croons a 1976 disco ballad,
Ah, if there's a cure for this
I don't want it
Don't want it
If there's a remedy
I'll run from it, from it
Think about it all the time
Never let it out of my mind
'Cause I love you
I've got the sweetest hangover
I don't wanna get over
Sweetest hangover.
Macolyte, Alex Brooks, editor of the blog, World of Apple was inserted into an MRI scanner to see how the mind of an Apple customer works. Professor Gemma Calvert at The Centre for Neuroimaging Services at Neurosense, showed him images of Apple products mixed with images of its competitors. The Apple images created the same activity in his cortex that Gemma has seen in religious people who are exposed to religious imagery. She used a Macbook to display a live feed of his orbitofrontal cortex - the part of the brain that makes all the decisions. Professor Gemma concludes that Apple has "harnessed, or exploit the brain areas that have evolved to process religion". Perhaps it is oxymoronic to say that something stimulates the brain like religion?
The Bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson - a Christian historian who is same age as Steve - reads the Hebrew text of The Book of Judges on his iPad. This is indeed an inspired act of worship convergence. Bishop Alan seems to have a very thorough fanboy understanding of the story of Steve as he does the story of Jesus. The good Bishop compares the "apocalyptical" battle with the beasts of the bible to Steve's battle with IBM. He loves the Apple Temple's glass staircase and its "texture of light". The arches of his cathedral are juxtaposed with the arches of the Convent Garden Apple Store. The latter features altars upon which precious artifacts are displayed and held. An Apple Genius is the acolyte whose role it is to guide you on the path to the salvation of the switch.
Bishop Alan jests good-naturedly, “With Christianity you have to wait for the second coming, with Apple (laughs) it happened in 1997" when Steve returned to Apple after a twelve year hiatus.
In Steve’s absence, academia had a field day analysing the walled garden that Steve had grown from a singular weed. Edward Mendelson, a professor at Columbia and the literary executor of W.H. Auden had this to say regarding the church of Apple:
In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in Catholic Europe, worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with “icons.” All is sound and imagery in Appledom. Even words look like decorative filigrees in exotic typefaces. The greatest icon of all, the inviolable Apple itself, stands in the dominating position at the upper-left comer of the screen. A central corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices. Infallible doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs in a sealed boardroom. Should anyone in his curia question his powers, the offender is excommunicated into outer darkness. The expelled heretic founds a new company, mutters obscurely of the coming age and the next computer, then disappears into silence, taking his stockholders with him. The mother company forbids financial competition as sternly as it stifles ideological competition; if you want to use computer programs that conform to Apple's orthodoxy, you must buy a computer made and sold by Apple itself.[11]
Six years later, Steve is still in exile from his company. The Italian semiotic superstar, Umberto Eco, repeated Edward’s motif:
Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.[12]
Macolytes are like sturdy Dark Age Catholics – following The Pope’s ex-gratia instruction to the letter. Everything else is heresy. On the other hand, Microsoft users are like the Ancient Greeks who shopped around for the best school of philosophy to suit themselves.
A netizen’s wry comment: “Every time I walk past an Apple Store I'm terrified one of the staff is going to come out and offer me a free personality test.” The witty rejoinder: “If you walked in the store, you passed the test.” [13]
One hopes Apple will never claim tax exemption as a religion. It would spell bad news for this blog/book. Surely questioning the company and its leader would be deemed a hate crime.
The CEO of the world’s oldest multi-national has recognised in Steve a powerful enemy. Pope Benedict XVI said technology consumption poses a threat to the Roman Catholic Church. He told his Palm Sunday plebiscites that technology cannot replace God. [14]
In his 2008 World Communications Day message, the Pope said: "If the desire for virtual connectedness becomes obsessive, it may in fact function to isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development." In the same Guardian article, the papal office took the opportunity to plug The Pope’s Facebook page and iPhone app.[15]
Obviously the Pope can’t complain too loudly. One of the most popular free iPad/Phone apps is the Holy Bible. Another app is "Popes of the Catholic Church" which talks up the old guys as if they were a pantheon of Marvel super heroes. Benedict fired off his first tweet on his iPad, June 29, 2011.[16]
[1] Lyons, D. (2008) Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs.Massachusetts: Da Capo Press.
By 2006, Steve’s company was worth more than his wife’s old boss, Goldman Sachs.[1]Steve needed more room for his exploding population of engineers. He needed to buy more land to build a larger campus.
On April 18th, 2006, he stood up at a Cupertino Council meeting to talk about a bigger boat to carry all his pirates.
This small event in Steve’s calendar was one of the finest examples of Steve in the ‘zone’. Although his audience was neither staff nor customers, and the hall was practically empty, he was still Mister Charisma. Council member, Dolly Sandoval introduced him, “We purposely set a very light agenda tonight just to highlight your presentation”. There were some knowing chuckles from the small gathering. His reputation had preceded him as a long-winded sales-man. Citizens are given three minutes to make their case. Steve took seven. He approached the microphone playing the role of the humble citizen. However, everybody recognised the man in the black turtleneck was a far cry from their humblest voter. Steve wasn’t there to ask permission from the council. He simply told them what was going to happen. He told them:
(1) He has been a Cupertino businessman for thirty years.
(2) His business has grown into a twenty billion dollar company.
(3) He is going to expand his business site, because he has already bought the property, and that’s that.
(4) They should feel lucky that he chose Cupertino because it’s cheaper to build on the land of the council next door.
(5) They should feel happy because he is their biggest tax-payer.
It could be argued that since Apple is so similar to a religion, shouldn't the company be tax-exempt like churches?
Considering the council’s delighted applause, he needn’t have pitched the ball so hard. The doe-eyed Councilwomen were especially happy for Cupertino’s favourite pin-up boy. Vice Mayor, Kris Wang fumbled an awkward analogy comparing buying property to educating a child. She just couldn’t think straight in front of Steve. He is now the largest landowner in Cupertino.[2]
Five years later, Steve had to drag his ass back into City Hall once again to talk about his proposed new campus – possibly his swan-song. This time it was an effort to stay on his A-game considering that his immune system had almost ground to a halt. By now he may be wracked with fever, chills and chronic lower back pain.
From the opening few words, one can’t help but feel a little misty-eyed at the inner strength of this outwardly frail man who made a such a palpable effort to go through the bureaucratic protocols. Rather than the “congrats and looking forward”, that he received last time from City Hall, the ill CEO had to cop some attitude from the Clueless Councillors. Luckily, the room was packed this time with posse of fan-boys who applauded as he stepped up to the mike.
He was armed this time with a well-orchestrated slide-show. The mayor tried to be helpful by advising him he can use a light-pointer. The presentation maestro brushed off the youngster and said, “I don’t really need to draw on the screen, it’s okay. You can see it clearly.”
Steve’s gallery of images revealed the most wondrous office that could ever be constructed. In fact, it wasn’t an office so much as a utopian vista.
For almost twenty years, Apple’s current campus has been surrounded by a circuit called The Infinite Loop. It was named after a computer program that repeats itself without end. It may also be interpreted as a metaphor for Steve’s constant recreation of himself, the self-reflexive ouroboros serpent eating its own tail, or perhaps a lab-rat on a wheel. In 1999, Michael Malone felt that The Infinite Loop was an apt title for his well-received book about Apple Inc.[3]
His proposed new campus adhered to the same curvilinear theme. The building is a perfect circle.
His illustrations reveal a curvaceous oasis of glass and foliage among an urban sprawl of asphalt. His plan is to boost the tree population by 60% and strip the land of its ugly asphalt by 90%. It’s an appropriate design considering that Steve is often critiqued for building a walled garden out of Apple. Now, he literally is building one. Steve said, “Apple’s grown like a weed.” - a weed, indeed.
On a darker note, one is reminded that his Silicon Valley Eden stands in stark contrast to the bleak and overcrowded dorms in the Chinese sweatshops that manufacture his product.
Steve explained why he selected that particular piece of land by way of a heartfelt story that will surely become part of Silicon Valley folklore:
This land is kind of special, to me. When I was thirteen, I think, I called up – Hewlett and Packard were my idols – and I called up Bill Hewlett, ’cause he lived in Palo Alto and there were no unlisted numbers in the phone book, which gives you a clue to my age (laughter). And he picked up the phone and I talked to him and I asked him if he’d give me some spare parts for something I was building called a frequency counter, and he did, but in addition that, he gave me something way more important. He gave me a job that summer. A summer job at Hewlett-Packard, right here on - in Santa Clara - right here off 280, the division that built frequency counters, and I was in heaven. Well, right around that exact moment in time, Hewlett and Packard themselves were walking on some property over here in Cupertino, in Pruneridge, and they ended up buying it. And they built their computer systems division there. And as Hewlett-Packard has been shrinking lately, they decided to sell that property and we bought it. We bought that and we bought some adjacent property that all used to be apricot trees.”
Steve continued to explain that he’s hired the senior arborist from Stanford University to replant the area once again with thousands of apricot trees.
His painfully careful presentation took twice as long as the last time he stood before the council. He said approximately the same things:
(1) He has been a Cupertino businessman for thirty-five years.
(2) He is going to build another campus, because he has already bought the property, and that’s that.
(3) Regarding power consumption, we don’t need your power supply, we’ll make our own - and cleaner. We’ll use your filthy grid as back-up.
(4) They should feel lucky that he chose Cupertino rather than the council next door.
(5) They should feel happy because he is their biggest tax-payer
This should have been an open-and-shut case. Unfortunately, Steve made the fatal mistake of asking, “I would love to answer any questions, if you have any”.
Introducing, Cupertino’s Council of The Three Stooges: Chang, Wang, and Wong:
Council Member Kris Wang was Steve’s doe-eyed cheerleader at the last meeting - not this time, however. Perhaps she’s a little bitter because she got bumped down from the Vice Mayor job in the interim. "How will this benefit the people of Cupertino?", she asks. How will this benefit the people of Cupertino?!! Let us expand on this phenomenally stupid question. This woman is asking how further business expansion and environmentally-conscious property development by their biggest tax-payer will benefit the people of Cupertino. It’s difficult to imagine a dumber question, but Kris managed to procure one nonetheless. She wanted him to be more “pacific” as to how Cupertino could benefit, for example, will he provide free Wi-Fi for the city’s entire ten square miles? “Yeah, no,” was Steve’s bored response.
Kris was flamed across the twitterverse for her faux-funny demand for Wi-Fi. Business Insider offered Kris a right of reply. Her emailed explanation was even more hilarious. After wading through all the self-promotion that she copied and pasted from her curriculum vitae, the reason for her asinine question can be summarized by saying that she assumes some kind of camaraderie with Steve and claims the question was a long-running private joke.[4] Steve didn’t seem to get the joke. Perhaps the rapport she claims to have with Steve exists only in her imagination. Perhaps Kris pretends she is cosy with Steve when she is dropping names at Rotary luncheons. Steve could buy City Hall three times over and then forget all the names of the councilors he sent into early retirement.
Councillor Barry Chang is apparently a long time Cupertino businessman. In theory, he should know something about running a business. However, his puerile question makes one suspect his business was no more complicated than the local laundry. Numbnut Chang asked Steve if he had considered the safety and fire regulations. Steve almost sighed. It’s safe to assume that safety may have come up somewhere in the planning considering Apple has spent a small nation’s budget hiring British architect legend, Norman Foster, to draw up the plans.[5] He’s the guy who designed London’s iconic “gherkin”, so he’s no slouch.
Mayor Gilbert Wong, is a drooling fanboy who looks and sounds like Lloyd from Entourage (and just as lame). He proceeded to whip out his iPad only to demonstrate how he can’t even use the “slide to unlock” properly. Despite his apparent love for the company, he introduced Steve as the CEO of Apple Computer. Apple Inc hasn’t been called Apple Computer since 2007.
He then asked Steve for an Apple Store in Cupertino. Steve’s tired response felt like he was explaining to a country child that building a Disney World in his little hometown is probably a dumb idea. If Gilbert wants to visit the Church of Apple, the nearest Store is Los Gatos – a mere fifteen-minute drive from Cupertino City Hall. Perhaps that’s still too far away for Dilbert, I mean Gilbert.
Apple made Cupertino. Its council getting all “gimme” with Steve is like the Columbian Government touching up Pablo Escobar for more money than they’re already getting. Local governments like Cupertino are forever broke and regularly extort “favors” from businesses looking to expand. However, these thinly-veiled mercenary tactics don’t usually receive almost two million hits on YouTube.You have to admire Steve's spiritual tenacity to stand up to the Council despite his physical pain. Philip Elmer-Dewitt observed that Steve "could serve as a lesson to CEOs around the world in how to bend a local government to your will." [6]
When he wasn’t answering stupid questions, Steve was forced to repeat the math of his proposal to the councilors who were having trouble following probably the simplest presentation in Steve’s stage history. This may have a lot to do with the fact that some of the council is made up of those to whom English is a second language.The only old white guy on the council waited toward the end to offer some gentlemanly words of encouragement. His name was Orrin Mahoney and he worked some thirty-five years for HP.
Among the audience were teenaged volunteers from the Organization of Special Needs Families and some fifth graders from Portal Elementary. They had arrived to receive rewards for their community work. One wonders how these young people reacted to watching the icon who brought them the toys they play Angry Birds upon.[7]
This final fact was reported by one of only two members of the press in the room, local lady, Ruby Elbogen. After Steve’s speech, she spotted him by the refreshments table:“A familiar looking man was standing there, all alone, facing the coffee pot.”[8] - All alone.
This author hopes Steve is still around to see the last pane of German-engineered glass slide into place by 2015.
[1] Elkind, P. (2008 March 5) The Trouble With Steve Jobs. Fortune Magazine.
[7] Elbogen, R (2010, June 6) Steve Jobs Shows Up At City Council To Introduce Apple’s New Campus. The Cupertino News. Retrieved from: http://cupertino-news.com/?p=1569
[8] Elbogen, R (2010, June 6) Steve Jobs Is In The Building Part Deux – The Rest of The Reveal. .The Cupertino News. Retrieved from:http://cupertino-news.com/?p=1585
