An American iCon

Do you remember the ads that Apple put out shortly after the first iPod was released? You couldn't miss them. They showed famous historical figures, great thinkers, and world leaders. People like Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi photoshopped with distinctive white headphones and an iPod in hand. It seemed like a surprisingly brash and even arrogant ad campaign by a company that made what amounted to shiny hunks of plastic and metal. These men were world builders and great thinkers, the kind of men whose every word and action could change the world. The hubris of this campaign begins to make sense when you think of the man at the head of the company it was advertising.

As we've all heard by now, Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO of Apple Computers, passed away on October 5 after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. Like many others, I found out about the death on a device that Jobs himself was responsible for. The outpouring of support from all corners of the media was instantaneous; even President Obama sent out his condolences. Suddenly, the "Einstein with an iPod" ad seems less farfetched. Steve Jobs's legacy in the worlds of technology, business, and culture cannot be understated, but what I will always remember was his cult of personality.

My first Apple product was an iPod Touch, one that has managed to outlive its creator. I loved it so much that I bought into the culture wholesale. I have a small army of Apple products now, and I'm a proud member of the cult of Apple.

When Steve died, I felt a personal loss. It seems silly; I've never met Steve Jobs, nor will I ever. The beauty of Apple's design, though, is in its human touch. Steve Jobs imbued all of his products with that which is lacking from almost all other tech on the market. Every single person who held a MacBook or an iPhone in their hand felt like they had a sense for Steve, like they knew what he valued, not just as a designer, but as a human being. Simplicity, intuition, innovation, these are the things that we associated with Apple and that every Apple user associated with Steve.

The man was not without his detractors. He was not known for his modesty and was often called difficult by those who worked for him. His vision was singular, though. In all his endeavors, be they for Apple or Pixar (another company he built from the ground up), he tried to push the limits of what technology was capable of while giving them that human element that made them more than just cool, but appealing on a personal level.

It's difficult for an Apple fanboy like myself to separate the man from the myth of Steve Jobs. It's easy to forget that Jobs was completely fired from the company he built out of his garage for nearly a decade before being brought back to revive it. Nobody likes to mention that the iPod, despite its cultural ubiquity and revolutionary design, obliterated the music industry. Apple's App Store is often criticized for its draconian approval policy for new applications. He was not perfect; he was not a god. His achievements, though, outweigh any and all of his shortcomings one hundredfold. The man was a visionary, a luminary, and a master of design. He turned a piece of fruit and a lowercase "i" into a fashion statement. If Bill Gates was the man to make the home computer popular, Steve Jobs was the man to make them beautiful.