No point wasting any time here; R I P, Steve Jobs. The most cliched line I can add here is 'You will be missed', but if it's true for anyone, it's true for you. Having said that, it's the biggest understatement of all time. The number of flowers being left outside Jobs's house in Palo Alto keeps increasing, as do the innumerable tributes at Apple stores and all over the internet. I woke up on the morning of the sixth of October to a message that said 'You have something to blog about. Steve Jobs is dead.' and I remember thinking that I had blogged about him just a month back on his retirement and saying 'I'm not gonna be able to do this' but at this point, it's become impossible to ignore what is being mourned as a loss to mankind. A tribute here, and then we look at the white black and yellow of this past week. :)
I've never owned an Apple product and personally never believed in the hype that surrounds all Apple products. The iPod didn't do much to change this because I looked at it as a much more expensive version of a mp3 player and said that there were much better deals out there with better sound, which would have been the most important aspect of a mp3 player back in 2001 when the first iPod came out. Still, by 2007, everyone had one and I was starting to see an ability in Steve Jobs that many had talked about - his amazing foresight. The mp3 player had become obsolete even though it was now much more compact than the iPod (that had been the initial USP of the iPod) because who wanted an mp3 player when all your music was stored on possibly the most futuristic looking device that was capable of playing music. By the time the iPhone came out, Apple had cemented a reputation of being way ahead of it's time because it ran on insanity, an aspect that Jobs himself talked about. A scene in 'The Pirates of Silicon Valley' shows Jobs's character on the floor, high on Acid hallucinating about being in a wheat field and controlling the wind and conducting classical music with his hands and perhaps 1999 was too early for the public to understand the correlation between that vision and the technology that Apple wanted to create. The first thing that will come to your mind if you watch that movie today, assuming that you know even a little about Apple products, is the multi finger touch sensor on a Macbook's trackpad which allows you to pretty much feel like a wizard.
In due time, of course, as is the natural course of these things, people criticized Apple and Jobs of being too capitalistic; and dubbed Apple users 'fanboys' who did not have any mind of their own. The lack of Flash support and compatibility issues were made fun of by a generation who thought 'Microsoft' when they thought 'computers' and granted, lack of Flash support and compatibility issues are a definite problem of Macbooks. This is only because for now, (and I stress on the 'for now' part), Microsoft remains the dominant computer retailer. Be it because of price or user friendliness, Microsoft has continued to dominate the market, something I personally see changing with the Windows 7 which is complicated and full of bugs. But it's not hard to imagine a world where Apple takes over this majority and 'compatibility' will no longer be a problem. My only concern is that technology is becoming more about style and graphics than user friendliness, but this is overshadowed by the fact that people who really want to use technology will learn and adapt. Making people smarter by compulsion is a strategy that will never fail to amuse me. Coming back to my tribute. What I'm trying to say is that technology is fast paced, and Steve Jobs has prided himself and his company of thinking ahead of the times, something which not everyone understands. A lot of Apple products have been criticized as being useless and hard to use, but what really intrigues me is Jobs's ability to look into the future and know beyond a shadow of doubt that one day, people will open up to his products and be so amazed not just at the products but at the fact that they did not understand those products not so long ago. Jobs gives the impression of being a genius way ahead of his times, and if a thousand tribute Tweets a minute come his way now, I can't imagine the amount of praises he will receive in the near future. Unbelievably, even though he has now passed on, the best is yet to come for him. Respect, Steve. Stay hungry, Stay foolish.
This post has been totally dominated by tech, and I realise now that there's not a lot of politics to talk about right now. So I'm just gonna summarize this in this week's white, black and yellow:
White: A lot of people's faces, after hearing the news. Also, some of the pictures that are being uploaded as tributes to Jobs. Touching, really.
Black: Internet humour on Jobs's death. Also, surprisingly, Anna Hazare for his 'Don't vote for the Congress, but vote for anybody else' campaign. Seriously a disappointment.
Yellow: Bigg Boss coverage, but that's pretty much expected and should remain constant for the next 50 days. Nothing like reality TV.
That's all for this week. Stay tuned. :)
I've never owned an Apple product and personally never believed in the hype that surrounds all Apple products. The iPod didn't do much to change this because I looked at it as a much more expensive version of a mp3 player and said that there were much better deals out there with better sound, which would have been the most important aspect of a mp3 player back in 2001 when the first iPod came out. Still, by 2007, everyone had one and I was starting to see an ability in Steve Jobs that many had talked about - his amazing foresight. The mp3 player had become obsolete even though it was now much more compact than the iPod (that had been the initial USP of the iPod) because who wanted an mp3 player when all your music was stored on possibly the most futuristic looking device that was capable of playing music. By the time the iPhone came out, Apple had cemented a reputation of being way ahead of it's time because it ran on insanity, an aspect that Jobs himself talked about. A scene in 'The Pirates of Silicon Valley' shows Jobs's character on the floor, high on Acid hallucinating about being in a wheat field and controlling the wind and conducting classical music with his hands and perhaps 1999 was too early for the public to understand the correlation between that vision and the technology that Apple wanted to create. The first thing that will come to your mind if you watch that movie today, assuming that you know even a little about Apple products, is the multi finger touch sensor on a Macbook's trackpad which allows you to pretty much feel like a wizard.
In due time, of course, as is the natural course of these things, people criticized Apple and Jobs of being too capitalistic; and dubbed Apple users 'fanboys' who did not have any mind of their own. The lack of Flash support and compatibility issues were made fun of by a generation who thought 'Microsoft' when they thought 'computers' and granted, lack of Flash support and compatibility issues are a definite problem of Macbooks. This is only because for now, (and I stress on the 'for now' part), Microsoft remains the dominant computer retailer. Be it because of price or user friendliness, Microsoft has continued to dominate the market, something I personally see changing with the Windows 7 which is complicated and full of bugs. But it's not hard to imagine a world where Apple takes over this majority and 'compatibility' will no longer be a problem. My only concern is that technology is becoming more about style and graphics than user friendliness, but this is overshadowed by the fact that people who really want to use technology will learn and adapt. Making people smarter by compulsion is a strategy that will never fail to amuse me. Coming back to my tribute. What I'm trying to say is that technology is fast paced, and Steve Jobs has prided himself and his company of thinking ahead of the times, something which not everyone understands. A lot of Apple products have been criticized as being useless and hard to use, but what really intrigues me is Jobs's ability to look into the future and know beyond a shadow of doubt that one day, people will open up to his products and be so amazed not just at the products but at the fact that they did not understand those products not so long ago. Jobs gives the impression of being a genius way ahead of his times, and if a thousand tribute Tweets a minute come his way now, I can't imagine the amount of praises he will receive in the near future. Unbelievably, even though he has now passed on, the best is yet to come for him. Respect, Steve. Stay hungry, Stay foolish.
This post has been totally dominated by tech, and I realise now that there's not a lot of politics to talk about right now. So I'm just gonna summarize this in this week's white, black and yellow:
White: A lot of people's faces, after hearing the news. Also, some of the pictures that are being uploaded as tributes to Jobs. Touching, really.
Black: Internet humour on Jobs's death. Also, surprisingly, Anna Hazare for his 'Don't vote for the Congress, but vote for anybody else' campaign. Seriously a disappointment.
Yellow: Bigg Boss coverage, but that's pretty much expected and should remain constant for the next 50 days. Nothing like reality TV.
That's all for this week. Stay tuned. :)
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