Remembering Steve Jobs, 15 Years On
Monday was 15 years. Steve Jobs died on 5 October 2011.
I still mark the day. I posted in 2023 and again in 2024, and back in 2011 I wrote a short goodbye the day after. Two years ago I wrote that his spirit “still lives on with everyone who picks up an Apple device.” I still think that. This year I wanted a little more than a caption.
The day I met him
I met Steve at the Apple booth at Macworld in San Francisco. It was the show where he launched the first iPod shuffle.
That was January 2005. Apple’s press release is datelined Macworld Expo, San Francisco, 11 January. The expo was at Moscone Center.
I said, “Thank you.”
He said, “You’re welcome.”
I said, “Don’t you want to know why?”
He said, “Do I need to?”
I took that to mean: when you make an impact, there’s no need to know how you did it, as long as you know you did.
I still told him. “Thank you for the products you create; they have changed my life.”
The little white stick
The shuffle was a brave little product. No screen. Play and pause, volume, back, forward, and a switch on the back. US$99 for 512MB, US$149 for 1GB. It was the first iPod under $100, and it came with its own lanyard so you could wear it straight out of the box.
In Apple’s own release, Steve called it “smaller and lighter than a pack of gum.” His pitch was simple: “with iPod shuffle you just relax and it serves up new combinations of your music every time you listen.”
The tagline was “Life is random.” I liked that. It was honest about what the thing did.
People thought a music player without a screen was crazy. Apple kept going anyway. A few years later I was writing about the third-generation shuffle and how much further they’d stripped it down.
Both Steves
I’ve thanked the two Steves before, on the Apple I’s 43rd anniversary. I won’t repeat that one. Woz built the machine. Steve figured out how to get it into people’s hands.
My own line runs back to an Apple IIc, the first computer I owned. I fell for Apple then and never really left. Every computer since has been a Mac. That’s a lot of dots.
Connecting the dots
In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Steve said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.”
An anniversary is a good excuse to look backwards. An Apple IIc. A screenless music player with a lanyard. A booth in San Francisco where I got to say thank you. Fifteen years on, those dots line up pretty clearly for me.
He closed that speech with a line he borrowed from the Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
Still good advice. Thanks, Steve.
