The irony is that one of the last things I said before going to bed was to my girlfriend, with whom I shared my concern of the total absence of any reference to Steve during Apple’s latest event. I talked to her about Scoble’s post on Google+:

I’m hearing that Steve Jobs won’t be at tomorrow’s press event. He’s just not feeling well enough to come out in public, I hear (and yes, that makes me sad, the industry will really miss him and they will see again tomorrow why). I keep wishing that these continued rumors are wrong, but know in my head that they probably are right.

and said, “you know, maybe he’s at the hospital or something. One day we might hear he’s dead just like that, out of the blue”. Of course I never expected that day would be today, the day following the event.

It really is Steve-ian to have stayed CEO until the last possible moment. Of course the words of Steve’s resignation keep coming back into my head.

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

But like many others I wouldn’t believe they meant his health condition had been decreasing. I thought he wanted some rest for the last years, if not months, of his life. I thought he would be there around the time his biography came out. I thought he would take time to have his house finally built. But no. Like so many geniuses and heroes before him, he fought until the last moment, and Death has come to him sooner than it should.

Of course I am still overwhelmed by the news and all the testimonials that are pouring out everywhere. I will take some time to reflect and think about what this news for Apple, even for me. As far as the website is concerned, I was working on the next version that would come out in 2-3 weeks. With today’s news I will transform the project into an online tribute to our greatest hero, the man who has changed the world several times over, one of the greatest innovators and entrepreneurs in history: our Steve.

I’ve always thought that the only positive thing that would result from Steve Jobs’ withdrawal from the public spotlight would be the flurry of stories to pour out from all corners of the Wold Wide Web. His recent resignation proved me right. To save you time and effort, here is my personal selection among the several dozens of articles and stories I have read in the past three weeks. If you think a worthy one is missing, do not hesitate to mention it in the comments.

The big news

• Steve Jobs’ resignation letter this one will go down in history
• Tim Cook’s internal letter to all Apple employees  leaked to Ars Technica

Homages

• Walt Mossberg: Essay: Jobs’s Departure as CEO of Apple Is the End of an Extraordinary Era Walt Mossberg comes back on Steve Jobs’ career (disclaimer: no emotional or particularly insightful comments)
• David Pogue: Steve Jobs Reshaped Industries nice article
• Steve: Who’s Going to Protect Us From Cheap and Mediocre Now? by former Apple France boss Jean-Louis Gassée, including a perspicacious metaphor about Steve riding the animal inside him
• Michael Moritz: Jobs founded Apple not once but twice Michael Moritz wrote The Little Kingdom, the first book about Apple — in addition to the infamous TIME portrait The Updated Book of Jobs. He later went on to fund Google and became a millionaire.
• Om Malik (GigaOm): Steve Jobs and the sound of silence a poignant hommage by Om
• No, Apple Won’t Be the Same Without Steve Jobs Mike Elgan over at Cult of Mac pretty much sums up my opinion on the post-Jobs Apple, including a personal favorite:
  

  The trouble with dictatorship or absolute monarchy is that success or failure depend entirely upon the quality of the despot. That’s why they fail. And that’s why a democracy that limits the power of leaders is best — it still works, more or less, even when incompetent morons are in power.
  But what about when the dictator is literally the single best person to lead? In those almost non-existently rare instances, despotism is by far the best form of government. Heaven, for example, is not a democracy.

• Apple Employees React to Steve Jobs’s Resignation (The Daily Beast)
• Where Some Earn Enmity, Jobs Won Affection (New York Times) about Steve’s uniqueness
• The NY Times has a very nice page with most of Steve Jobs patents – possible source of inspiration for the next version of all about Steve Jobs.com
• YouTube tribute: “We are all Steve”
• Adweek released an edited version of the Think Different ad with Steve Jobs in his right place at the end (the shot is from the 1981 video before he goes on TV for the first time)

Steve Jobs stories

• The Wall Street Journal’s compilation of Steve Jobs quotes good selection
• The First Time I Met Steve Jobs… Fast Company has a very nice compilation of a number of Steve Jobs stories that have come out after the resignation
• Icon Ambulance Vic Gundotra, former Microsoftee and current VP of Social at Google, tells the story of a call from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning
• Steve Jobs’ Two-Minute Lesson by Forbes editor Quentin Hardy
• An Inspiring Story About a Young Apple Fan’s Experience With Steve Jobs an encounter at the NY 5th Avenue Store opening
• My one question for Steve Jobs in 2000 recollection from a former Apple intern
• So, Steve Jobs has left his role as Apple’s CEO nice anecdote of an encounter on Apple’s campus by former employee David Cairns
• Apple all-star alumni recall Steve Jobs’ lessons on SFGate
• You’re the ones internal Apple employee meeting
• An encounter at a restaurant by Ryan at Gdgt

Rediscovered treasures

• Joe Nocera at the NY Times gives away (PDF) a great profile on Steve Jobs he wrote back in 1986 (during the early NeXT days) for Esquire
• How Apple works: Inside the world’s biggest startup the Fortune article is finally released. Apparently author Adam Lashinsky will turn it into a book later next year
• David Pogue dug out an old article of his from 1998
• The old story (related in Alan Deutschman’s The Second Coming) on the joke played by Steve and Larry Ellison on a naive guy who thought he could run Apple, back in 1998

On Steve’s health

• Steve Jobs: ‘Unfortunately, That Day Has Come’ BusinessWeek reports Steve spent a full day at the Apple campus before he tendered his resignation, including an ‘emotional’ meeting with his executive team
• Rarity of Steve Jobs’ cancer and treatment provides few predictions, few options The San Jose Mercury News confirms that no media/doctor, unless directly involved, know and can predict anything about Steve’s condition
• Jobs Struggled With Health Problems for Years The Wall Street Journal comes back on a decade of fight
• My Neighbor, Steve Jobs a touching story from a Palo Alto resident

Here is the letter most of you will have already read I’m sure.

August 24, 2011 06:34 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Letter from Steve Jobs

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

I will give myself some time to think more deeply about the future of Apple and of course, of Steve himself. What I am dreading the most is the noise that we, “the Apple Community” — and especially we, Steve Jobs admirers — will have to endure in the coming months from ignorant analysts or sensationalist hacks about that historic event. I hope they will show Steve the respect he deserves.

Good luck to Tim Cook for running what is, has always been, and probably always will be, Steve’s company — and certainly his greatest masterwork.

Thank you Steve for the incredible journey you have led Apple and all of us on. I’m sure it is not over. After all, today is the first day of the rest of your life. 

I have moved the website to a new host last week. It should now be faster and more reliable. And today, I moved the blog to that same host. It is now really 100% under all about Steve Jobs.com, since all things Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to be catching on, and is just too confusing. Even though I am keeping the URL allthingsstevejobs.com, it will now point to allaboutstevejobs.com/blog. You might have noticed the better cosmetic integration with the rest of the website too.

I don’t think any of you has missed the two big pieces of Steve Jobs news from the past two weeks:

• the city of Cupertino has published the plans for the upcoming Apple ‘spaceship’ campus. It’s not bigger than the Pentagon — but close. If you’ve had a thorough look at the plans, Steve’s favored apricot orchards are showing up in the north east garden of the campus (see picture below).

• the biggest news is of course the release date of the Isaacson biography (the authorized one, not that fake Chinese one) which has been advanced to November 21. That’s right, it’s just three months away! Get the whole story from Philip Elmer-Dewitt at Fortune 2.0.

Here’s what I put aside for you:

• July 9: A weird video surfaces from Taiwan. A tea brand shamelessly used an actor to play Steve Jobs and sell bottled tea in a TV commercial. See for yourself:
  
  
  (via Cult of Mac)

• July 8: French magazine Le Point reveals that Steve almost purchased a castle in the South-East of France. Pictured below, the property is valued at around €25m ($36m). Apparently Steve’s wife, Laurene, toured the property herself.
  The article also relates that back in 1985, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a French journalist close to President Francois Mitterrand, apparently asked of the head of state a special present to Steve Jobs for his 30th birthday. I’ve read many stories about that famed birthday, where tons of celebrities attended, including Ella Fitzgerald who was the party singer. Anyway, JJSS (as he is often called) reportedly suggested that the French nationality was offered to the Apple co-founder as a special gift. The French President nonchalantly refused. I think Steve would have appreciated the gift, as he has often testified of his love of France (I have made a compilation of the many times he uses France in Apple demos).

• July 11: a new Tshirt made it to the Apple Gift shop in Cupertino… making fun of the company’s cult of secrecy. I’m buying it next time I go there! (via Macrumors).
  
• July 21: John Gruber of Daring Fireball spotted a nice anecdote about Steve and his legendary curtesy. I am quoting the same thing he did:
  

  The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. “I am George Bodenheimer,” he said to Jobs. “I run ESPN.” Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard,” then turned and walked away.

• July 21: Philip Elmer-Dewitt dug out a nice chart that compiles all the public data about Apple’s reiumbursements of the expenses of Steve’s famed private jet airplane. I think it is worth mentioning that Steve can use the jet for his personal use, but then of course the company doesn’t reiumburse him of the cost of operating it. The chart is below:

• July 23: after all the nonsense we’ve come to read about Steve’s succession lately (which did grant us a new Steve Jobs quote: “it’s hogwash”, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal) — John Gruber wrote a very good article, the kind that only he knows how to write, on the topic: On Succeeding Steve Jobs. His conclusion: “the obvious structure for a post-Jobs Apple is simply Apple as we know it, without Steve Jobs.” I believe he is 100% right and that’s what we will see, perhaps as early as next year. BUT, and it’s a big BUT, I am not sure Tim Cook can keep the fire alive as Steve did for the next decade. And as I’ve stated before, I think he will have trouble running the company unchallenged the way only the genius-founder Steve Jobs can. His authority to run the super-disciplined fruit company will probably be challenged a couple of years after Steve is gone… Time will tell.

And it’s cool. See for yourself:

Old design

New design

(expert eyes will recognize Albert Watson’s portrait of Steve from 2006).

This is the kind of decision in which, although it has zero importance in the grander scheme of things, I’m 100% confident Steve Jobs has a say. It explains why it’s the first time we’re seeing this picture in color… And why, just like last time, Steve’s portrait is quite dated (the one before was a picture from 1998 on which Steve posed with a 1st-generation iMac).

One thing that hasn’t changed though is the mention of one Steve’s pet peeves, the “apricot orchards” of Silicon Valley that he misses so much:

Steve grew up in the apricot orchards which later became known as Silicon Valley, and still lives there with his family.

There are countless examples of his using these exact words, e.g. this 1995 interview where he said:

My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley for the most part at that time was still orchards —apricot orchards and prune orchards— and it was really paradise. I remember the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other.

or even the recent presentation he gave to the Cupertino city council when he announced Apple’s plans for its next campus — during which he actually insisted that the campus would host actual apricot orchards in its park!

As a side note, it’s also actually quite telling that the bio is much shorter than some of the other executives’ ones, although of course they have achieved much less than their boss….

Well, three days after the WWDC keynote, Steve made a (sort-of) public appearance again to unveil what he had been working on all along: Apple’s impressive future super-campus. The video is quite interesting to watch, mostly to see Steve describe the project, and despite the embarrassingly stupid comments and lame jokes from the City Council members (Can we get free wi-fi? Will the employees exit the building safely in case of fire? Why don’t we have an Apple Store?… pleaaase). Here’s the spaceship in Steve’s own words (please note this one-building design has nothing to do with what Spanish magazine El Economista talked about in December of last year):

For an architecture aficionado like me, there is so much to talk about this design. But I’ll stick to Apple metaphors.

I believe the whole concept of a single, huge, perfectly round building, surrounded by a forest, is an excellent metaphor for Apple as a company and even as a culture. It is the opposite of Google’s more open, decentralized, more ‘democratic’ (dare I say disorganized?) campus: image of a company working on different projects, going into several directions, without an apparent guiding principle. No, the Apple campus is a perfect, almost utopian (dare I say authoritarian?) building. Like an Apple product, it’s simple and straightforward (a circle). Like Apple the company, it’s huge and impressive in its size and organization. But even more than that, it’s pretty much a fortress secluding Apple employees from the outside world by a heavy artificial forest, just like Apple’s cult of secrecy isolates them from the rest of the industry.

The more I looked at the sketches and plans of the Apple spaceship, the more I thought of this:

This is Apple’s org chart (org circle?) that appeared in Fortune’s excellent Inside Apple story two weeks ago. I think it is one of the most telling and accurate depictions of the Apple Way. Coming back to our spaceship campus, I think you see where I am going:

That’s right, to make the metaphor complete, Steve’s office should be right in the middle: the centerpiece of this high-tech fortress, the ultimate impulsion and decision point that pushes everything Apple does, before it goes out the fortress to the bewildered world.

It’s an understatement that I can’t wait to go back to the Bay Area in 2015 to take a tour of that building, should I have to enroll in architecture school to do so (see Steve’s speech at 14:40 if you don’t see what I’m referring to).

He’s here, but this is the first post-Steve keynote.

This is what every Twitter follower of Mac uber-blogger John Gruber read during Monday’s WWDC keynote.

Quite a surprising statement — one could on the contrary argue that seing Steve back on stage, even though he is still officially on a medical leave of absence, is a supplemental affirmation of his enduring commitment to Apple.

But this is one more of several indications of his possible progressive departure:

• in the Fortune piece Inside Apple, Adam Lashinsky wrote about the so-called Apple University, a program that Steve Jobs put Yale professor and management guru Joel Poldony in charge of. Its goal is to make business cases on Apple history for future Apple leaders — in short, to codify Steve’s management. In a way, it is reassuring that he thinks about the future of the company without him… but obviously it means he has his departure in mind already. For some time now, because the program was started in late 2008.
  
• second of course is the upcoming authorized biography, iSteve: The Book of Jobs, available in March 2012. Steve has been super-secretive as Apple’s CEO, and one can wonder whether this sudden publicity is not a testament that he’s slowly accepting his (overwhelming) place in history, and stepping back as a day-to-day leader of Apple to become more of an old wise genius watching over his baby. Who knows?
• the third is more anecdotal, but quite telling to me. If you watched carefully on Apple’s homepage, you noticed this change just as I did:
  I chose the October 2008 keynote because during that show, Steve also shared the stage, with Tim Cook and Jony Ive. But WWDC 2011 is the first time I see the other keynote participants (including recurrent ones such as Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller) being put front and center on apple.com like this. I am certain this is no coincidence — Steve Jobs really must be preparing the press/the community/the world for Apple’s future keynotes, without him as master showman.

Only time will tell, but perhaps 2012-2013 will see the departure of Steve Jobs as official Apple CEO.

• The New Yorker did a story on the history of the computer mouse, back to Xerox PARC and the famous Steve Jobs visit that supposedly inspired Lisa then Macintosh. One of the mouse’s inventors, Malcom Galdwell, recalls what we already know, that Apple didn’t “steal” the mouse from Xerox. Unfortunately the story can only be accessed by subscribers — I didn’t subscribe just to read it. The abstract is here (not very well done). It contains interesting old sketches and pictures of prototypes, as well as quotations from the piece, such as this one:
  

  “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off [Jobs], and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like,‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue,” Hovey told Gladwell.

  (via Cult of Mac)

 

• We’ve talked about it earlier: the building of the extension of Pixar’s Emeryville campus, Pixar Phase II, is now over. Check it out on the excellent Pixar blog.

 

• A curious piece of trivia, some study was made to prove that Apple had actually the same effect on fanboys that a religion (or, more appropriately, a cult) on its followers:
  

  As discussed in the new BBC documentary “Secrets of the Superbrands”, when you put an Apple fanatic under an MRI and start mentioning iPhone 5s and iPad 3s, neuroscientists found that Apple tends to stimulate the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.

  No news to me.

 

• And I thought I would never be able to find new keynotes… but no, two oldies came up this past month to add up to my impressive collection. I hope you guys take time to check them out, because they’re both pretty interesting.
  First, an interesting one (and in high quality, too) from 1996, where Steve Jobs still spoke as CEO of NeXT Inc. — but already famed CEO of Pixar — at a Microsoft Developers Conference, about NeXT’s server technologies, WebObjects. In the video he is a late speaker, which is a testament to how unimportant he seemed to be. He is also very casual and humble, as depicted in a number of articles from that time (he was just coming out of his wilderness years). Watch the keynote here (via Daring Fireball).



• The second one I just found, and on YouTube, too! it’s a casual chat Steve Jobs had with then-struggling Mac developers at the end of the 1997 WWDC! Definitely worth a look if you’re interested in Steve Jobs history. Again, it is a testament to Steve’s unchanging character and principles. He stands by the same rules now as he did then,  including the most important one: building great products. He also mentions something I knew from a 1999 interview, quoted below:
  

  About 10 years ago I put in a T1 to my house. I’m actually getting ready to put a 45 mg fiber to my house, because I want to find out what that will be like, because everybody’s going to have that someday. But I have a pretty sophisticated setup; whether I’m at Apple or at Pixar or at my home, I log in and my whole world shows up on any of those computers. It’s all kept on a server. So I carry none of it with me, but wherever I am, my complete world shows up, all my files. Everything. And I have high speed access to all of it. So my office is at home too. And when I’m not in meetings, my work is fundamentally on email.

  in the aforementioned video, we discover Steve’s been working in such an environment since 1990. This is thanks to NeXT’s very advanced ‘inter-personal computing’ (i.e. networking) technology. So basically Steve’s been living ‘in the cloud’ for over 20 years, while we mere mortals will probably find out  what it’s like thanks to a product that he will introduce (if rumors are to be verified) tomorrow. The advancement of NeXT’s technology still continues to amaze me.

 

• Business Insider has published a thorough interview of Apple’s first CEO, Mike Scott. Honestly I haven’t had time to read it yet, so I wo’nt comment on it, but you can be sure I will pretty soon. (via TUAW) Same goes for the Fortune article Inside Apple, which I finally got my hands on last week, but haven’t yet had time to write about.

 

• Conan O’Brien dressed as  the iLeader in a baroque fresco by Fast Company:

 

• I am still waiting for AllThingsD to put up all their sessions’ videos online, but so far of all the extracts I’ve seen, one was particularly funny. It was an extract from the opening interview with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (disclaimer: my current employer) in which Kara Swisher told him a Steve Jobs anecdote about Android phones being ‘probes in your pocket‘. The funny part was how Steve called the Google search engine: ‘The Borg’, a Star Trek reference, but also a term often used by Fake Steve to describe Microsoft. Once more, in search of satire, he was actually depicting the truth of Steve’s mind.

 

• Some guy did the One More Thing Rap Song. I hate rap but here goes. Weird.

 

• The biggest news hit this morning (French time): iSteve, The Book of Jobs, the much anticipated authorized Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, is already available for pre-order on Amazon. I won’t pre-order it because I’m sure that by March 2012 I will have an iPad 3 to read it on via the iBookStore… I was pleasantly surprised with the picture on the cover, a vintage portrait of Steve from the Macintosh heyday. I have no idea whether the iLeader was involved in this design or not — although I assume he was. The cover in high res is below:

I am, as I imagine you are, incredibly excited by the coming of this book.

The biggest news is of course that the book is ‘authorized’, meaning Steve, as opposed to previous biographies, helped its making instead of blocking it. What usually happens is that whenever a journalist or writer tries to interview someone from Steve’s entourage, he faces a wall of silence, akin to an omerta. Indeed, they should be wary of what they say, because historically Steve has shown some pretty harsh un-forgiveness with indiscreet friends and relatives.

The most famous example of this trait is Michael Moritz’s 1982 piece, The Updated Book Of Jobs, which he wrote as Time Magazine’s Silicon Valley correspondent (Moritz later wrote the first good book on Apple, and arguably the first Steve Jobs biography, The Little Kingdom). Moritz had been given carte blanche at Apple to write the portrait of Steve Jobs who was a serious candidate to become Man of the Year 1983. Instead, he turned out this much more critical piece, including a testimonial from Steve’s college friend Dan Kottke: “something is happening to Steve that’s sad and not pretty, something related to money and power and loneliness. He’s less sensitive to people’s feelings. He runs over them, snowballs them”. Steve apparently broke all ties with Dan after that article was published.

But this time, Steve is said to give biographist Isaacson acces to his closest friends and relatives. I imagine among the friends there will be Larry Ellison, Bill Campbell, Bob Metcalfe, perhaps Al Gore. I am curious about Steve’s relatives. Will Laurene speak up on her husband? I’ve never found any trace of her speaking of Steve in public. Or perhaps his biological sister Mona? That’s more likely.

The active collaboration of Steve will have of course positive as well as negative effects. So far, previous biographies (such as my personal favorite, Alan Deutschman’s The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) only could be based on interviews of ghosts from Steve’s past life (I’m referring to you, Dan Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld), or of pissed off former employees who had regained their ‘freedom of speech’. This is nicely put by Chris Smith in an article I will refer to below:

In recent years, several biographers have gamely tried to chart the depths of Jobsʼ psyche, with little help from the man himself. He rarely speaks to the press, save for tightly scripted sound bites, so all these accounts are based on talks with old colleagues and Apple Deep Throats, supplemented by occasional in-depth interviews heʼs granted to a few lucky reporters over the years.

Any journalist who’s tried to go a little deeper had to endure Steve’s legendary wrath, as described by Rich Karlgaard in his 2006 WSJ article Vladimir llyich Jobs? (for the heck of me I can’t find a link to it, but I have a scanned version on my Mac):

Years ago, he phoned me on a Saturday morning and tried to squash a story my then-magazine, Upside, was about to print on NeXT, Inc. NeXT was his second startup after Apple. But it was failing and our story said so. On the phone Mr. Jobs cooed and threatened, including warnings to “watch my backside” and strangely, “don’t ride a bicycle alone on dark roads.” We ran the story. Michael Moritz, before he was a venture capitalist funding Yahoo and Google, once covered Apple as a Time magazine reporter. Mr. Jobs repeatedly tried to get him fired. Dozens of journalists have stories like this.

Of course, it’s no wonder in these circumstances that Steve Jobs portraits tend to be dark. What’s to be feared from an authorized biography is the opposite, that it’d be too polished. The only example I can think of is the excellent TV documentary on the history of Pixar, The Pixar Story (2007). Jobs appears in the film, but in exchange, there is barely any mention of Alvy Ray Smith, one of Pixar’s visionary co-founders , whom Steve fired in the early 1990s (after they’d had a rough argument in which Alvy criticized NeXT and Steve, Alvy’s Southerner accent).

An excellent article was posted by Michael Wolff on this precise issue, it’s called The Steve Jobs Biography: What Story Will Be Told? Wolff makes a wish that Isaacson will perhaps criticize Steve to sell even more copies. Quote:

If Isaacson likes to associate with great men, to imagine himself as a great, too, what he really understands is the shape of the modern career, the strategic, even Faustian mastery of the commercial world that produces epic success. That’s the darkness that animates Isaacson’s Kissinger book— preternatural talent depends on preternatural ruthlessness.

Finally let’s come back to the title of the book. It’s not only interesting because it re-uses the clever pun Moritz made up in his 1982 article (as well as the not-so-clever use of Apple’s trademark i prefix, already used by Steve Wozniak in his own autobiograhy, iWoz). It’s also to me the latest in Steve’s many whimsical allusions to biblical culture. I can think of several, including the Tablet of Commandments during the iPad introduction, or the clever quote pictured below: “we’ve consulted every possible higher authority“ (to make the G5 run cooler), during the Macworld 2006 keynote.

Which leads me to the article I mentioned earlier, by Chris Smith, which is three years old now, but which I only stumbled across very recently, appropriately called Is Steve Jobs God? It is definitely one of the finest (and most delightful to read) pieces I’ve ever read on the state of Steve Jobs literature, and it’s error-free to boot. I agree with its final stance, that basically the best Steve Jobs portrait so far is perhaps by Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve (in his blog and his derived book, oPtion$):

Much like Hunter S. Thompsonʼs Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, whose phantasmagoric, not strictly factual probing of the rot at the core of the American dream told us more about the shifting cultural winds of ʼ60s-era America than any number of straight histories could, oPtion$ digs deep into the zeitgeist and comes up with a foundation myth that resonates.

The last two paragrahs are too good to be left out. They put the justification for my enthusiasm to build and maintain all about Steve Jobs, which Mike Cassidy called “a digital shrine to a tech god”, in beautiful words:

The gods donʼt have to play by our rules, and Jobs, bless his sometimes Grinchlike heart, is a god for our times, a secular deity who for years has offered us a better tomorrow courtesy of technology and design. Now he has his finger on the pulse of three major industries—computers, music, and movies—and is busily threading them together. In the process, heʼs forging a whole new world. Such is the power of his vision that we cheer his victories as if they were our own and forgive his occasional missteps (remember the underpowered and overpriced Cube?), because, well, God created both the peacock and the mosquito, and his ways are sometimes inscrutable.Even if you spend your Sunday mornings with the Times instead of the Bible, youʼre probably still looking for the meaning of it all. I know I am.
Jobs, the computer geek who elevated design to high art—and who once dressed up as Jesus for a Halloween party—has provided that spiritual heft for many of us. Thereʼs a reason Apple fans used to make Kool-Aid jokes. Forget the legions of politicians, prognosticators, and fire-and-brimstone preachers: When Jobs talks of a new day rising, we canʼt wait for dawn to break.

Steve, I’m definitely not the only one waiting for your Holy Book!