Steve Jobs:Dead

[Guest]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

[Dave2002]

Really sad.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

great life .... the purchase of Pixar in 1986 after leaving Apple for $10m and sale in 2008 for billions and a place on the Disney board is a quite remarkable story ..... he was not a technologist in any sense of education or professional qualification ... but a genius as an entrepreneur who understood what technology had to do to be desirable .... he made several dents in our universe ... we will miss his old age ....

[BBMmk2]

One of the great visionaries of the electronic world died. What a luminariy! Thinking of people's needs before anyone else and improving on them to.

STEVE JOBS 1955 - 2011 RIP

[Nick Armstrong]

As I tap away on my MacBook Pro with the iMac gracing the far side of the room, I'm very sad that we have lost another 40 odd years of creativity and flair...

[Boilk]

What a luminariy! Thinking of people's needs before anyone else and improving on them to.

I'm not too sure that anyone ever really needed an iPod, iPad - many of these alleged 'needs' for iconic mod cons are purely culture- and marketing-driven technological fetishes.

But nonetheless yes, a real visionary of our times. I have heard of some people being cured of pancreatic cancer, but I'm guessing Jobs chose the route of toxic allopathic medicine and left it too late for drastic dietary shift.

[Mandryka]

The Ayn Rand interview seems to approve of him (it may not be aware of his alleged Buddhism), which makes him a very rare person indeed.

[gurnemanz]

The Ayn Rand interview seems to approve of him (it may not be aware of his alleged Buddhism), which makes him a very rare person indeed.

I read just now that Margie Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church has stated (with delicious irony via an iPhone tweet) that:“Westboro will picket his funeral. He had a huge platform; gave God no glory & taught sin,”

I don't use any Apple products and don't have the same insight into Steve Jobs' world-shattering significance as others seem to have but anyone who annoys bigoted fundamentalists is OK by me.

[kernelbogey]

I've learned more about Jobs since he died than I ever previously knew.

I'm impressed by his learning from cancer: this from the Stanford speech.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

[Dave2002]

He said those words in 2005. He must have had a bit of a reprieve, bit it's really sad that it wasn't a lot longer. Pancreatic cancer is usually pretty quick. According to a news item he had a rare form, which in theory is treatable and in that sense survivable. However, a significant thing he said was that in the end it makes little difference. We're all gong to go. Should we try to face up to that? I don't know.

[kernelbogey]

Even so, six years is a long remission. And he had a liver transplant, suggesting he had liver cancer too, which I thought was, at least until recently, untreatable. (Maybe being a billionaire helped there.)

But I think the point he was making about contemplating death - 'important tool' - is aimed at us all, the healthy included.

[John Wright]

Hmmm, reading some obits etc he's widely credited with 'changing the world'. His name is on (or he got it on to) hundreds of computer-related patents. But there's some misreporting going on, like inventor of the Mouse and i-player - even early BBC news reports yesterday mentioned the i-player.

As for iPod and iTunes, seems to me he was the manager and marketing man, and for sure those things have changed many people's lives.

And yes iPod and iTunes changed MY life - but only that I can no longer browse several city record shops to find some good music