I've Owned Almost Everything Steve Jobs Created, Sadly No More

I've owned or worked on Apple (and even some NeXT) products since I was a college student in 1979. It's almost unbelievable that one person had a hand in nearly all of them: Steve Jobs.

It will be hard to imagine technology without his imagination, drive and attention to detail; it's even harder to imagine what the world of technology would have been like without him. I think the world would have been a beige, boring place today.

Yet even with all his brilliance cancer still took him too early; technology, which he served so well, failed him in the end. We can create incredible things but human frailities still limit  how long we have to do them.

One of my favorite quotes from literature, from The Agony and The Ecstasy, is where Michelangelo's painting teacher tells him "an artist must leave a body of work". Like Michelangelo and his contemporary Leonardo Da Vinci, Steve Jobs left an amazing lifetime of building things that changed people's lives and the world around them. An impressive body of work that has now ended forever.

I can say I wish I could do what Steve did but I imagine none of us can or even have the opportunity to try; he appeared at the right time with the right ideas, twice in one lifetime.

Steve was a rare genius who not only had the ability to see the future, but to see what people really wanted and see how it could become a reality.

People always accused him of having a reality distortion field but in the end his view of reality became real.

Sadly there will not be one more thing.