There have been a spate of news articles lately squabbling about whether or not Apple has lost its mojo. I was going to sit down and spout off about that in typical fashion, but instead I’ll show this little infographic.

As you can see, there were five years between first beginning a new product line and bringing it to life. I’d make a pretty strong case that the iPad wasn’t a new product line but an evolution of the iPhone , as well as a return to the goal of the original project.

If we take these carefully arranged assumptions as true (watch my magic trick here), then we can go one step further and observe that at the time the iPhone was released, Apple was still a smaller company, R&D wise, than many and most likely could devote resources to one major new product at a time (I’ll back that up with observing that if development on a new project started in 2002 then that would be just a year after the iPod was released in 2001). Rolling along with that, that would mean that a new project would have gotten fired up around 2008 – 2010 (dependent on how much effort the iPad took). Which means we are in line for a new product sometime around this year which, let me check my notes, yep, they are promising.

But far more important is this: if I’m right (and I’ll bet you a donut I am) and new product lines were being developed shortly after the first iPhone, then señor Jobs was directly involved in those projects. Whatever the next few products are, people are forgetting that they will likely have been worked on for years beforehand.

This means we easily have one or two product cycles left before we actually start discovering what a Jobs-less Apple is like, one way or the other.  That might not be the case if a horde of monkeys had magically taken over since Steve passed, but as we have all been made incessantly aware Apple is currently run by those who were most aligned with his vision. Further, even after these immediate new products, we’ll only get a chance to see the next round of new ideas another several years down the road.

So. I suggest we all take a big speculation chill pill when it comes to the future of Apple. Instead, we should speculate wildly about what is about to be released, because you know, rumors aren’t milling themselves.

History proves again and again that time marches on, but nothing ever changes, and those who fail to study history won’t be able to whip out boring historical facts at the drop of a hat. Or learn from it, I guess.

The story referenced above is exactly what people bandy about as ‘social engineering’ which is another way of saying ‘your fancy passwords don’t mean anything if GoDaddy tech support lets someone call and reset your password to something they request.’ As you no doubt already know, that is exactly what happened to the owner of the @N twitter account. With the godaddy account – and therefore domains, websites, and hosted information – in the invaders possession, he bargained with the owner of @N to turn it over the twitter account willingly.

There’s been a frenzy of online discussion (rightfully so) over this story. In terms of security advice, where do we go from here? Everything that’s been typically given as advice would have been thoroughly useless in this case. What advice do we give out now?

It’s fascinating to me that the refrain that’s gone up in many circles is ‘don’t store your credit card online!’. Really? It’s 2014 and we have to start having arguments again about the basic safety of online transactions, period, the way we were back in 1994? That’s a pretty dismal state of affairs.

A dismal state of affairs that is perfectly rational as long as your perspective is ‘prevent my account online being compromised at all costs’. Unfortunately, that’s an immediately problematic perspective, since that’s not really possible. The minute you hand over your financial or personal data to another entity, you surrender a degree of security that you simply can’t reclaim. The kicker is that it doesn’t matter if this is entity is online or not, all that matters is that it’s not you. 

The most you can do is take reasonable steps to secure yourself, that will increase the balance of probability (thank you, mycroft) in favor of your information remaining safe. The trick lies in defining  ‘reasonable’ . I would suggest ‘that which does not render useless the service you are attempting to use’. In other words, the same rule of thumb applies as with all things technological: when you start tipping the scales to something being a nuisance rather than a benefit in your life, it probably needs to go.

So is manually entering credit card information each time such a huge nuisance? In some settings, no. In settings where you are making multiple orders per day as part of a business? Where you don’t want to risk service interruption and have an auto-payment configured? In a life where we now have multiple online accounts for which we pay for things – for some even most things – on a daily basis on our phones? Um, yes. Can you imagine entering your credit card number on your AppleTV each time? Click, click, click goes the remote. Crash, it goes, out the window.

So what are we to do? Throw away the AppleTV? Give up on our credit card being safe and not use it? Well, you could do either, I suppose. But let me ask you this: do you assume that everything in your is completely secure from fraud?

Credit card companies already answered this a long time ago, and the answer is…. no. Fraud happens every ding dong day, and one of the excellent reasons to use credit cards, actually, is the protection they provide the user in insulating them from the cost of fraud. In fact, the kind of social engineering that the fraudster used to get access to the GoDaddy accounts in the above mentioned story is no different than the kind of fraud that plays out on the streets, supermarkets, and houses of the world every hour on the hour. We don’t stop commerce as a result, and we are hopefully not so naive to assume that there is no risk on a daily basis. We find ways to mitigate and soldier on.

If it helps, consider this: the number of cases where someone gains access in an illegal manner to your account via being a smooth talking swindler is exponentially lower than the number of people who outright have their credit card stolen. We don’t stop using credit cards as a result, and I don’t think we should stop using them in online accounts.

In other words, the entire semi-hysterical response to this event has been by people who have spent their life figuring out ways to prevent themselves of being victims online, and suddenly realized that when you give another company all your stuff, they get to make decisions about that stuff without consulting you, promises notwithstanding. Welcome to the cloud, everybody, it’s awesome, you have no control, enjoy.

Which, I believe, illustrates what the real lesson needs to be  here: these companies need to get on the same bandwagon that Visa, MasterCard, et al, all got on a long time ago and flat out accept that fraud happens, preventing it entirely is impossible, and you have to have measures in place to repair the damange after it is done.

The real head-scratcher here is that Twitter has no way of looking at their records to see if it matches the story being told by Naoki Hiroshima, do some investigative work with both he and the current account holder and then give the account back if everything checks out. If they don’t have way to do that, they should , as should every other major internet services provider. And we should be demanding that they let us know that these measures are in place.

The other thing one should really do is backup all your website data locally, by the way.

There is an article on the Wall Street Journal website that wrestles with some of the ramifications of that question. It’s titled ‘Are Smart Gadgets Making Us Dumb?’ and it’s dumb.

Actually, I take that back. It’s not entirely dumb in that it raises very valid questions about the implications of technology becoming increasingly ‘smart’. Examples abound: the HapiFork rumbles when you are eating too many bites per minute (no, really), the BinCam takes a shot of the trash you put in and tries to motivate people to be smarter about their trash choices, WiThings is a scale that tweets our weight. So on, and so forth. Yeah, they are profoundly stupid. I agree with that.

But the author’s central tenets:

That social engineering is being disguised as product engineering (shaming people into recycling via Twittering scales and bins)

That ‘intellectual poverty’ awaits us in a ‘smart world’

Are ones I strongly disagree with.

It’s true, technology that attempts to supplant our critical thinking process fundamentally mis-understands how technology is best applied: to remove tasks that do not involve critical thinking on our parts, so that we can get to that faster. Put another way, it exists to reduce the amount of information and increase the amount of data; reduce the amount of labor on a task and increase productivity.

Products like the HapiFork come from a very good intent (lets make people more aware of their diets!) but misses the mark by assuming that we respond well to another buzzing thing applying guilt to something we already feel guilty about. We don’t respond. We stop using the fork.

And that’s just it. Most articles of this nature point breathlessly to incredibly futuristic devices (the modern kitchen will tell you ingredients don’t go well together! Noooooooo.) but betray their complete lack of understanding about how humans and technology interact by forgetting that historically no one wants products like that. Geeks constantly try to make them, sure, and the market promptly rejects them. Remember Clippy the paper clip? Dustbin. Security alerts in browsers? Useless. How about grammar check, talking scales, and so on? Huh. Heck, how many of us pay attention to the check engine light? Engineers and entrepreneurs around the world make products based on the latest fad, and the current one is the assumption that somehow if it’s social, it’s awesome. Of course, it’s not, and really, social is the .com boom of the 90’s re-lived all over again.

So while it’s true those products are useless, they are also somewhat trivial and inconsequential. A larger problem is that extrapolating from that, the author goes on to produce such wisdoms such as:

“Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn’t mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

With “smart” technology in the ascendant, it will be hard to resist the allure of a frictionless, problem-free future. When Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, says that “people will spend less time trying to get technology to work…because it will just be seamless,” he is not wrong: This is the future we’re headed toward. But not all of us will want to go there.”

This is particularly problematic thinking. On the one hand, because it makes a bizarre assumption that we as a human race will ever be able to produce a ‘frictionless’ society or that we shall suddenly stop making mistakes and be problem free. First… really? My, that is some strong crack you have there. Secondly, that kind of thinking, taken to it’s logical conclusion takes you down to:

“It’s great when the things around us run smoothly, but it’s even better when they don’t do so by default.”

YES. Because the answer to our problems is PROBLEMS. Why didn’t I see that particular solution before?

To be fair, what I believe he’s trying to say is that a life of ease is not necessarily what is best for us. In a society where wealth has made technology freely available, where we have more choice than ever before, and an abundance of peace and resources, why aren’t we happier?

That is a worthwhile question. For all of our successes, and for all the abundance of computing technology available to the average human being, can we definitively point to ourselves being happier than societies that live without our amenities and advances, or perhaps even more tellingly, can we say we are happier than we were a generation, or two generations ago? Certainly, there’s evidence to suggest otherwise; the United States has what is a very high depression rate relative to others, and there are even interesting studies such as this, which equate higher suicide rates in the states and countries that report themselves as happiest.

How exactly you measure happiness is, of course, a pretty good question too but even outside of that it’s a small jump for many people to equate ‘wealth’ and ‘success’ with an abundance of technology and point out that it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.

For myself, I would certainly argue that hardship can indeed be very good for us. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that hard work, the process of being life making us think and act for ourselves on critical matters, is invaluable to the development of a healthy human being. This isn’t a wild thought – there is plenty of research to back these things up.

But lets say all this is true. What, exactly, are we to do with this information? The author says ‘not all want to go towards the future laid out before us.’ Okay then, which future do you want?

There aren’t very many solutions to the ‘technology can be bad for us’ dilemma – which, by the way, we are inferring from the ‘we need hardship’ argument that is being made. You can strip technology out of your life, or the life of society, or your community, or whatever permutation your vision takes you to, sure. I wouldn’t really argue against that path, honestly. Living in a cabin in the woods can be pretty great, I can vouch for it. Of course, if you’re using an axe you’re using technology, just technology you are very, very used to. We won’t even get into how advanced having a book or two might be. There was a time when people were getting as worked up over that (or more) as they were over Facebook.

But how do you have that axe? Where did that steel come from? How do you come to live in a country or area where roving bands of Vikings don’t swoop down and pillage your utopian farm? And if your child is bleeding out on the ground from an accident, would you like a hospital with medicine to take him to, or say, a helicopter to medivac them out? What price would you put on technology in that moment.

There, you see, is the proverbial rub. The world we live in that lets us have esoteric arguments about technology exists thanks to technology. Precious few of us would actually be willing to follow through with the full ramifications stripping technology from society, and if we are, it will involve some difficult choices. You don’t have to know Microsoft Word or basic computing to be happy, but your employability opportunities shrink profoundly. So you either become happy with a very specific set of lifestyles, or you aren’t actually opting for the no tech path. And let me tell you, if you want to choose the no tech path and are wringing your hands about it on Facebook, then in the wise words of the internet You Are Doing It Wrong.

This brings us to scenario two, The Luddites Nightmare:

Accept responsibility for the technology you have in your life.

Look, if you aren’t going to strip technology out of you’re life, and if society isn’t going to (spoiler alert: it’s not), then we are left being cursed with this terrible life of ease that geniuses warn us of on the Wall Street Journal. If that is our greatest challenge, if we live in times when we must challenge ourselves instead of waiting for random chance or fate to do it, then we need to accept that challenge instead of avoiding it. If technology is disempowering you, it’s because you are capitulating. If looking up answers on wikipedia takes the mystery out of life, I submit that you have a frightful lack of inquisitiveness. If you are annoyed by your phone beeping too much, you are perhaps too lazy to find out how to stop it. As human beings and as a society, it is our responsibility to take the technology we have and own it, and any discussion about our lack of freedom in response to an ‘intelligent’ trashcan indicates you’re simply looking for a way to avoid that.

Remember our earlier conversation about living that life in the cabin? In actuality, that isn’t so much a choice to eliminate technology as a choice to simplify. What that means is that ultimately, the answer to the dilemma our society faces is we need to find balance between using technology and keeping our lives simple so that we can enjoy them. In a delightful and perverse twist, that’s actually what technology is supposed to be for. An axe is there to expedite your fuel preparation (among other things) so you can move on to other things. Wikipedia is there to tell you how to sharpen the axe, care for the axe, and how to best store the wood so you know, you don’t have to spend years figuring it out by trial and error.

And that is my fundamental problem with that and similar articles. Rather than finding solutions to the problems we’ve imposed on ourselves – Too much tweeting! Too stressed out! Computers are complicated! Everything is buzzing! I’m too distracted! – they simply suggest we should be concerned about the inevitable advances that The Scientists are bringing our way. In the end, this line of thought takes away choice, and increase our perception of powerlessness.

The author might argue that by raising awareness, he’s encouraging better choices. But you know, at this point, we have an awful lot of awareness. I know very few people are who aren’t frustrated by their gadgetry every day, and I don’t blame them. What we, as a society, have a dearth of is conversation or research about fundamental ways we should be using computing tools in our life to

A) Simplify our days
B) Increase our free time
C) Utilize that free time in ways we will be happy about in the long run.

There’s a fair bit of conversation about the latter, but most of the first two are mostly reduced to – use technology less!

It’s counterproductive in the worst way.

I believe our conversation should be about how no, your device does not control you. You have total control over it, and over your life. I believe that if there are areas in your life that are frustrating to you, you should actively seek help in coping with it, whether it’s by relegating the task or learning the necessary skills yourself. I believe that if we, as a society, acknowledge we are blessed with the potential for one of the most ‘friction free’ societies in human history, then this is an opportunity to come together and innovate what to do now.

For me (who wields no political power whatsoever), it boiled down to this: while it’s a political move, it’s not one of party affiliation. I’m not taking a stance on something liberal, or conservative, or communist, or freecoffeeist (free the beans!). It’s one of affiliation to our stated goal: to make technology work for you. The foundation of the internet is the free flow of information, and the fact that we have that today is one of the more staggering achievements in human history. It has changed your life already, and can do so in even more ways that haven’t been imagined yet. Curtailing and censoring that information at will is the equivalent of turning the river by your house into a kiddie pool. Safer, and stupid. The reality is, what those bills would have ended up doing is crippling the very things I work so hard to provide for my clients.

I have strong political views. Actually, scratch that – I have strong views. Shocking, I know, you do too! On everything – politics, religion, restaurants, didgeridoo performances, the list goes on and on. And further, I believe pretty strongly that a healthy society lets many different views be voiced all the time.

All that being said, I work hard to keep my views to myself while working, and Out of a Jam as apolitical as it can be. The reason has less to do with not trying to offend people than it does with my firm belief that that’s how things need to be if I’m to do my job well at all.

People trust me. And not just me – all IT people, everywhere, are invested daily with an insane amount of trust. Credit card numbers, passwords, private information, the list goes on and on.

Amazingly, most people never ask me anything about this, but I have a strict set of rules anyway. I don’t write down passwords (unless it’s part of a pre-agreed service between the client and me), I never touch any portion of the computer I absolutely don’t have to to fulfill the job, and so on. But part of that is also a desire to let my clients know that I will provide them with high quality service regardless of their beliefs or personality quirks. If I believe that technology can make your life better (and so help me, I do), and it’s my mission to bring that to fruition in your life, then I don’t want you worrying that I’m going to make off with some compromising political information. Doctors have a code, Priests have a code, and IT should have one too.

Outside of the fact that IT people often don’t (I’ve talked to more than one person who’s worked in a computer shop that bragged of the dirt they’ve uncovered), there’s also the consideration that this needs to extend to more than just privacy (although I gotta tell ya, that one time that a man pulled out a giant wad of cash, waved it under my nose and suggested we go to Vegas for the weekend, I had to wonder what he and his friends were up to in that trailer), but how we do the rest of our job.

We should make it more useful.

Not ‘better’ – far too often, people in my position get caught up in insisting that someone use a piece of software that’s the ‘best.’ Or, man, you really should have THIS installed. No no, configure it this way. Oh, let me just set up you up with this account real quick.

If the net result is that things are no different, then it was a waste of time. If it makes things less productive for the user, then it was worse than a waste of time.

And for me, this applies to how safe people feel in bringing me their problems. It’s important that they know that regardless of their lifestyle, political affiliations, or even my personal views on them, I will give them the best, most useful, advice that I can.

And in this case, my advice is this: if you like the internet, or see it as useful, laws like SOPA and PIPA will make it less useful, not more.

Because of that (knowing), and because my interactions with Borneo Rock Dwellers are limited, I didn’t see a reason to write anything about it. He was dead, you knew that, and chances are all the topics would be covered five or six times over.

As it stands, I feel there’s a topic that hasn’t been covered.

This thought was inspired by reading an article by Maria Bustillos over on The Awl titled ‘Less Human than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple.’ Ms. Bustillos’s point seems to be that Apple’s design aesthetic – and by extension, that of Jobs – isn’t human. It’s impersonal, it’s cold, it lacks good human values. This dovetails into other things that frequently start to crop up whenever people talk about Apple’s former CEO: Apple is trying control us, the machines are our enemies, there is no soul in this technology, and the only thing of value that Apple has brought to our lives is, well, nothing. They make expensive crap that has turned us all into zombies. Zombies, man! Zombies that don’t even like brains, but just shiny things! And oh, Steve Jobs was a jerk! And didn’t give money to charity! And I’m a unique flower who doesn’t buy into the hype!

On a personal level, I feel that there are so many logical inconsistencies in the article that my toes start to curl just reading it, but I found myself wondering why I cared. After all, people aren’t logical all the time and you don’t see me walking around with curled toes. I disagree with most of the human race on one topic or another, and don’t feel compelled to write anything about it. What was the difference?

Being misunderstood, cliche though it may be, is a trigger point for most of us. When someone starts saying things about us that just aren’t true, that, then, is what gets our goat. I don’t mind that you disagree, it’s that you are making up the topic of disagreement!

So, before I can start frothing at the article in question, it might be helpful to explain a few things about those of us who do like Steve Jobs, to clear up misunderstanding. Why do I care? And not just I, but a great many people in the same position as me; people working in the technology field, passionate about technology? At the end of the day, the reason is really simple:

We agreed with him.

He was the person on the planet who said the things we believed, who articulated our, my, passions so precisely and, most surprisingly, brought them to life. It’s not that I walk around going, ‘Wow, thanks Mr. Jobs for teaching me the truth, the light and the way.’ It’s that I walk around saying, ‘Hey, if you want a really good example of what I’m talking about, check out what the dude in the black turtleneck was saying.’ This is not a strange thing, we do this all the time, on countless topics, every day. We refer to other people as examples, either in speech or action. Steve Jobs just happened to embody both those things, and he did so with a keen passion. This is a passion that I often, on a day to day basis, feel embarrassed to even acknowledge. I remember once, years ago, having a conversation with a close friend in the same field as I, and laughingly observing that I was crazy enough to actually think that the work I got to be part of could change the world. When he quietly noted he thought the same thing I remember a lightbulb going off in my head – so many of us feel that, but don’t quite know what to do with it.

And what, exactly, are we passionate about? Well, technology, sure. But it’s a bit more specific than that. It’s the deep belief that computers matter.

Putting words into italics doesn’t really make them matter more, and to a certain degree, the statement is laughable. But then, saying water matters or food matters is ludicrously simple as well, but we all know that hey, indeed, they do matter, and if we don’t treat them like they don’t, things get hairy. And truth be told, I feel that all too often, we don’t realize just how much computers matter in our world today.

No, I’m not going to start preaching about computers running every system you interact with, blah blah blah. That just makes one want to retreat to a rock in Borneo, and I get that. But consider for a moment: no one is going to argue that life matters (I didn’t even feel I had to italicize that) – unless you’re some whackjob, you probably agree. And there are any number of life saving procedures in modern medicine today that would simply be impossible if it weren’t for computers. They provide us with an absurd amount of power.

But hey, that line of thought is also not uncommon; I’m just using it to drill down to this one: personal computing matters. Why? Because humanity is literally and figuratively sitting on an atom bomb of technology, grabbing the tiger by the tail and the only hope we have of making it not explode in our faces is ensuring that computers serve us, not we them. That’s a cute line that is used everywhere, all the time – including the article I’ve linked to – without any understanding of the implication of that statement; the only way computers will serve ‘us’ is if anybody can use one. And as it stands right now, that sure as shoot isn’t the case. People feel entrapped by their technology.

In short, technology needs to be human.

“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?” – Steve Jobs, working on the original Macintosh (via Folklore.org)

Steve Jobs was obsessed with creating products that were human, that fulfilled their functions beautifully and efficiently. With making a product that we could all pick up and use. The result of such a thought process is that human should be simple.

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list….That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away.

“That’s what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” – Steve Jobs

You know what I feel when I read those words?: ‘Yes! Somebody else gets it!’ I don’t think, ‘Gee, that’s so profound, I’ve never thought of that before.’ These thoughts exist in me, because of my beliefs, ideas, and passions. And I am not alone.

Currently, we are a planet of bicycles careening this way and that, with people riding backwards, on training wheels, or not at all, simply holding their bicycle and walking along beside it. I’m passionate that bicycles are great, and everyone should be able to ride one. Steve was too. He was obsessed not with computing, but with personal computing. Not with technology, but tools for every human being.

That I believe this work is vital, altering history in ways we cannot begin to fathom, I am not alone in that either. And so I, and people like me, care.

So what does this have to do with an article discussing the design aspects of Apple products?

Ms Bastillos writes: “Steve Jobs was, in short, too much a plutocrat and too little a craftsman to produce an ultimately satisfying appropriation of the warmer, more humane minimalism of the mid-20th century, which was rooted in a vision of a more egalitarian, fairer world. To what degree do ‘good design,’ or ‘taste,’ depend on human values?”

I would respond with this:

“People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs

If you seriously believe something is important, you care about it. And if you truly care about something, you can’t care about a part of it and forget the rest. If you do, the rest will suffer, and if there is any inter-dependence between the two, everything will suffer.

The disconnect for people like Maria Bustillos is that they haven’t stopped to consider that perhaps the design is in no way separate from the function of the machine, a function that is almost entirely virtual, represented on a screen. In that case, what function does the design really serve?

“Steve encouraged the Mac designers to think of ourselves as artists. In the spring of 1982, he took the entire Mac team on a field trip to a Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibition in San Francisco, because Tiffany was an artist who was able to mass produce his work, as we aspired to do. Steve even had us individually sign the interior of the Macintosh case, like artists signing their work (see Signing Party), encouraging each one of us to feel personally responsible for the quality of the product.” – Andy Hertzfield  (Folklore.org)

The answer for Steve Jobs was fairly simple – as it should have been for a man who espoused simplicity. The design is there to emphasize the user interaction with the OS, to serve as backdrop, not as a centerpiece. The stores, the case, and increasingly the OS itself are all designed to provide focus on what the user is doing. Unlike many other tools, where what you hold is the function, with most of Apple’s products what you hold is the frame, the gateway to the function itself. In other words, the beauty of the design should stem from how little of it there is. Naturally, this extends to the OS itself – functions that are serve as gateways to the primary experience have been increasingly de-emphasized by Apple to focus on the content; hence the smoother backdrop of the Finder in Lion, compared to significantly brighter visuals in applications users interact with most often – iCal, Addressbook, Mail, etcetera (this is not by any means meant to condone the atrocity that is iCal in Lion). The point here is though, that the actual user experience is meant to be inviting, friendly, in contrast to the frame of the case, the packaging, the store, and so on which are minimalist in the extreme. One only needs to look at Steve Jobs house to immediately see how differently he perceived living space versus commercial space. These differences are not there as a mistake, but as purposeful and conscious design choices.

What’s important to distinguish is that Jobs isn’t the creator of these concepts, but he believed in them, and acted on them. That he may not have succeeded by the estimates of some is a matter of opinion, and it matters little to me which way your opinion sways. But what is irrefutable is that he tried constantly, believed with an intense passion that it was the right thing, that it was a moral question. A lot has been made of Jobs not partaking much in social causes, but what is missed is that he firmly believed what he was doing was a social cause.

None of this is to imply that he was a wonderful human being. He may or may not have been. I didn’t know him. None of this is to imply he was the best thing to happen to humanity since Mother Theresa, or Gandhi – he definitely wasn’t. Frankly, I don’t really care. What matters to me is pretty simple:

Struggle to see the parts, struggle to see the whole. Or else you won’t see anything.