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If there ever were a person who demolished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quip that “There are no second acts in American lives,” it was Steve Jobs. By the time he passed away yesterday from pancreatic cancer, he had seen, by any reasonable estimate, at least half a dozen acts in his 56 years.
Anyone would count themselves fortunate to change the world once in a lifetime, but by even a conservative accounting, Jobs changed it at least four times.
The first was with the founding of Apple Inc. in 1976. Steve Wozniak provided the technology, and Jobs provided the visionary and marketing genius that would kick off the entire home computer revolution with models like the early Apple, Apple IIs and Macintosh. Do you use a mouse to interact with a graphical user interface on your computer? You can thank Steve Jobs for that.
Ten years later, he bought a small computer-graphics division from George Lucas and renamed it Pixar, beginning the long development process that would culminate in Toy Story (1995). The first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story started a run of high-quality family films that changed the face of animation.
In 2001, he completely altered the music industry with the introduction of the iPod, followed two years later by the iTunes store. People could now store their entire music collections on a device no larger than a deck of cards. In turn, iTunes gave birth to the digital music industry, gradually replacing hard media with downloadable audio and video files. Without iTunes leading the way, it’s hard to image digital delivery becoming as ubiquitous as it has.
Finally, there was the iPhone. Apple didn’t create the first smartphone, much like Thomas Edison didn’t create the first incandescent light bulb. They just created the first one that mattered. It showed people a new way to interact with their world that went beyond “phone” to deliver something that let you handle email, read the news, listen to music, take pictures, run any number of high-powered programs, and play games like Angry Birds, all in the palm of your hand.
And this is just the Steve Jobs highlight reel. There were also models of desktop and portable computers (iMac and iBook), tablet computers (iPad) and operating systems (NeXT, OSX and iOS), not to mention revolutionary software that allowed people to do everything from edit their home movies to create professional-quality music, art or print publications.
Technology pioneered by Jobs has driven the entire Catholic new media revolution. (When Pope Benedict XVI launched the Vatican’s new website, he did it from an iPad.) Father Roderick Vonhögen, CEO of the Catholic new media company SQPN, is candid about his debt to Apple.
“Without Steve Jobs, I would have never been able to record and distribute the podcasts I made in the Vatican during the events surrounding the death of Pope John Paul II and the conclave that lead to the election of Pope Benedict XVI. SQPN would probably have never existed.
“Hundreds of thousands of people were touched by Catholic podcasts or by Catholic iPhone/iPad apps,” Father Vonhögen continued. “I still receive mail on a weekly basis from people that returned to the Church, discovered confession and even their vocation to the priesthood or to religious life thanks to their iPhone, iPad or iPod.”
An ‘Unwanted’ Child
There’s another important angle to the life of Steve Jobs that should cause those who consider themselves “pro-choice” to pause. One of the mantras of the “choice” crowd is “We want every child to be a wanted child.”
But Steve Jobs wasn’t wanted. In 1954, a young college student named Joanne Schieble became pregnant by her boyfriend, Abdulfattah John Jandali. The couple would later marry and have another child, but in 1954 they were not ready for parenthood. If the pregnancy had occurred after 1973, the odds are quite high that it would have ended in abortion.
Instead, the child was adopted by a loving couple named Paul and Clara Jobs, who also adopted a daughter. When he was 32, Jobs finally met his birth sister, novelist Mona Simpson, and the two separated siblings formed a close and lasting bond.
Only a few days before Jobs’ death, in a homily for Respect Life Sunday, Deacon Greg Kandra spoke of this “unwanted” life, and the impact it had on all of us.
“It would not be overstating things to say that Steve Jobs is my generation’s Thomas Edison,” said Deacon Kandra, a blogger at Patheos.com. “As one observer put it, he knew what the world wanted before the world knew that it wanted it. If you have an iPhone or an iPad or an iPod, or anything remotely resembling them, you can thank Steve Jobs. If your world has been transformed by the ability to hear a symphony, send a letter, pay a bill, deposit a check, read a book and then buy theater tickets on something smaller than a cigarette case … you can thank Steve Jobs. And: You can thank Joanne Schieble.”
There have been 54 million abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973. We will never know how many of these lost children would be another Steve Jobs.
Jobs leaves behind four children of his own, and in a famous encounter with a secular journalist, admitted how parenthood changes your understanding of the world. It led Jobs to bar pornographic applications from his devices, saying “there’s a porn store for Android [smartphones]. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn; your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to go there.”
Challenged to defend this, he observed that his critics might “care more about porn when [they] have kids,” adding that he believed Apple had “a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.”
Jobs kept his own religious beliefs, family life and even his political opinions largely to himself. Baptized and confirmed a Lutheran, he was a typical “spiritual seeker” of his generation. Inspired by the Beatles, he traveled to India to learn wisdom at the feet of a Hindu guru, Neem Karoli Baba. The guru was dead by the time he got there, and Jobs came back as a Buddhist. When he married Laurene Powell in 1991, it was in a Buddhist ceremony conducted by a Zen priest of the Soto sect. Although he was a contributor to Democratic candidates, he never spoke about political issues.
Searching for some analogy for the cultural loss, author and columnist James Lileks compared the death of Jobs to the death of Walt Disney, another visionary who changed the way we see and interact with the world, then died before his time. After cataloging the list of inventions he oversaw just in the past 12 years — from the iBook to the iPad — Lileks wrote: “It all seems inevitable in retrospect, but it wasn’t. It took a guy who could see several steps in the future. Beyond this to the thing beyond that.”
Father Vonhögen sees meaning in his death as well as his life.
“Since the diagnosis of his cancer, Steve Jobs lived in the face of death,” he said. “It changed him. He once said: ‘Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t interest me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.’ This ’memento mori’ explains his passion and his drive in everything he did. He welcomed death as something that gives value and meaning to every single day.”
Thomas L. McDonald frequently writes about technology and games for the Register.
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I find the lionization of Steve Jobs in the press, and particularly here in Catholic media, to be quite disturbing. Mr Jobs contributed to and helped form a culture of greed that is endemic in society today. Apple’s products appealed solely to the vain who had to have the latest and greatest at any cost. He was not an innovator, as graphical operating systems existed well before Mac OS, as did small devices for playing mp3s. His business practices locked people into a monopoly with Apple as the dictatorial leader of all they did—battery replacements on iPod that could only be done by Apple, proprietary screws on computer cases that could only be removed by an Apple technician. He moaned about Microsoft’s supposed monopoly of operating systems, yet refused to make Mac OS available on any hardware but that from Apple. Steve Jobs was no saint. He was everything that is wrong with capitalism. He was the poster boy for greedy consumption. May God have mercy on his soul.
I use Apple products and am not a vain person. Nor do I have an insatiable thirst for the latest and greatest at any cost. May God have mercy on your judgemental soul.
Steve Jobs revolutionised the world by spearheading the drive to make technology accessible. Xerox didn’t bring the graphical user interface to the masses. Apple, lead by Steve Jobs, did. Creative et al didn’t bring MP3 players to the masses. Apple, lead by Steve Jobs, did. They innovatively unified and applied poorly implemented ideas to produce superior products.
His business practices are unorthodox but are admired by many others (Apple was deemed “recession proof” during the financial crisis). Owing to those business philosophies, Apple, lead by Steve Jobs, provide products with a far superior consumer experience (iPhone customer satisfaction surveys, for example). I have owned aesthetically pleasing iPods but have never needed to have the battery replaced. Nor do I know of anyone that did. Any reasonable person would rather an Apple technician modify the internals of their Apple product than their untrained self. Apple’s decision to provide a comprehensive, integrated product to consumers has produced devices of superior quality, performance, usability and reliability. When was the last time you wanted to change the operating system on your DVD player? You haven’t. You buy the product that, in itself, allows you to do want to do. Furthermore, if you don’t want a Windows PC, you can now feasibly buy a Mac. That’s the choice consumers are now faced with which was one they didn’t have some time ago.
Steve Jobs lived a life that should point to God. God, as a being of infinite love, goodness, truth and beauty, made Steve in his image and likeness. He chose to build a company which he’d be intimately involved in whose work improves the quality of life lived by millions. He worked towards the good, for example, by breaking down barriers of distance between people or by giving people tools to learn and grow. He encouraged and pushed people to think and to think different. He strove for not only aesthetically pleasing products but products which did what they did beautifully well.
On the other hand, you’d rather see the world in it’s tendency to succumb to it’s fallen inclinations and view Apple, lead by Steve Jobs, as the mud and greenery of pigs. You fail to see the bigger, comprehensive picture which Steve Jobs was trying to weave and blatantly ignore facts. Most seriously, you fail to recognise God glorified in creation.
Wow defender, that’s rather harsh! Liking the personal factor of having real people help me to solve computer problems and embracing the great apps that are available for disabled children makes me vain, huh?
Don’t forget how many jobs came from his ingenuity! Or how many people have been inspired by his work, and with the help of his products!
What would you make of this Jobs comment, and I’m just asking:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
@Tom R,
I think he’s just saying to think for yourself and make your own decisions.
Look at the back of one of his i-phones, the word after “made in…” He was a job-killer.
I think the press, even surprisingly the Catholic Press, is celebrating him to the point of idolizing him. Don’t get me wrong, he was one of the most significant and important business leaders of the last 40 years, but I think much that has been written about him in the last few days is tinged with exaggeration.
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Many of Jobs’ innovations would have made it to us sooner or later. The mouse was invented by Xerox. I-Tunes didn’t invent digital distribution of music; what it do was legitimize it and make it profitable. The i-Phone was not the first smart-phone that mattered; do we forget how common Blackberries were and that they were popularly known as Crack-berries?
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What Jobs did have was a knack for picking the right technologies and figuring out how to take them from the hands of the geeks (and I write as a geek), refine them and take them mainstream. From that perspective, he certainly shaped our world.
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I think we also need to give him some credit here for the fact that the Apple App-store remains actually fairly clean of the smut that is so common in the internet. That certainly was part of his vision as well.
All I can comment after reading your Responses is that, this man made one very humane and God-pleasing decision and stuck to it - he rejected pornography from being spread through his Inventions. That to me, is his greatest service to mankind and surely God noticed that and has rewarded him as he deserves. Rest in Peace Steve Jobs
Mary42:
Steve Jobs was struck down by cancer in middle age. Did God smite him for outsourcing jobs?
Oh my Merciful God, give me patience. Don Schenk, Jesus died at only 33 years. Our first Holy Saint of this Millennium, St. Maria Faustina Kowalska - Jesus’ Secretary and Apostle of the Eucharistic Apostolate of the Divine Mercy - died at 33 years only - and this, after 13 years of excruciating and wracking Tuberclosis. Did God smite His Only Beloved Son with the most cruel death through Crucifixion? Difinitely NOT. Did God smite St. Faustina with such a painful illness and death at such a young age? Definitely NOT. Through the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, God reconciled mankind to Himself. Please read the Biography of St. Faustina’s Life, or “The Diary”- Divine Mercy in My Soul. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains the Doctrine of Suffering and Death in the Economy of the Salvation Mystery. Be blessed.
I think we need to be careful here. None of us know what Steve Jobs’ ultimate fate is. We can trust in the mercy of God that his soul was judged as mercifully as possible. While his limiting of pornography on Apple was praise worthy, I think we need to keep in mind that actions alone are not sufficient to merit salvation.
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It is my sincere hope that before or at the time of his death, he accepted Christ’s grace and was forgiven his sins (I don’t have any particular sins in mind, just that we all have sinned, and unless we have just been to confession likely have sins that have not yet been forgiven).
Mary42,
You may be upset that I blasphemed your savior Steve Jobs, but you’re the one who claimed that God rewarded him for inventing the i-phone.
So what did god do in return for his destroying so many American jobs?
Don,
Uh, no, Mary did not say God blessed Steve Jobs for inventing the i-Phone, she said he blessed him because he kept pornography off of his devices (as much as possible). There is a huge difference there.
MarylandBill:
You Steve Jobs worshipers still haven’t answered my question: if being rich means that God blessed Steve Jobs, what does the fact that he died of cancer at 56 mean?
Don,
With respect, I am not worshiping Steve Jobs. If you would care to read the comments in this thread again, you will see my first comment complained that he was being idolized by the Press. I do believe, however, in giving credit where it is due. I don’t know whether God
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As for his being blessed? Who can know the mind of God? Certainly Jobs received much from God, but also his life was cut shorter than most of us would want for our own lives. I know if I died tomorrow, I could not complain to God, for he has blessed me with more than I ever deserved. As Mary pointed out, being blessed by God is not necessarily the same thing as having a long and peaceful life.
So let’s see: the argument is that everything good that happened to Steve Jobs is a reward from God, and who can say why God struck him down at 56?
Don,
I am not sure if the blessings he received were for the good he did or for other reasons, but everything that happens in life, for good or ill is because allows it.
This is a silly point to make: “There have been 54 million abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973. We will never know how many of these lost children would be another Steve Jobs.”
We’ll also never know how many of the lost FETUSES were Charles Mansons. Nobody aborts “children,” come on.
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