alone on a black stage and produce as if by magic an “incredible” new electronic gadget (小器具)
in front of an amazed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is
fetch and work with numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to
be magic”. Mr Jobs, who died recently aged 56, spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly
designed, easy-to-use products.
The reaction to his death, with people leaving candles and flowers outside Apple stores and
politicians singing praises on the internet, is proof that Mr Jobs had become something much more
significant than just a clever money-maker. He stood out in three ways-as a technologist, as a
corporate ( 公司的) leader and as somebody who was able to make people love what had
previously been impersonal, functional gadgets. Strangely, it is this last quality that may have the
deepest effect on the way people live. The era of personal technology is in many ways just
beginning.
As a technologist, Mr Jobs was different because he was not an engineer-and that was his
great strength. Instead he was keenly interested in product design and aesthetics (美学), and in
making advanced technology simple to use. He repeatedly took an existing but half-formed idea-
the mouse-driven computer, the digital music player, the smartphone, the tablet computer (平板电
脑) — and showed the rest of the industry how to do it properly. Rival firms competed with each
other to follow where he led. In the process he brought about great changes in computing, music,
telecoms and the news business that were painful for existing firms but welcomed by millions of
consumers.
Within the wider business world, a man who liked to see himself as a hippy ( 嬉皮士),
permanently in revolt against big companies, ended up being hailed by many of those corporate
giants as one of the greatest chief executives of his time. That was partly due to his talents:
showmanship, strategic vision, an astonishing attention to detail and a dictatorial management
style which many bosses must have envied. But most of all it was the extraordinary trajectory (轨
迹)of his life. His fall from grace in the 1980s, followed by his return to Apple in 1996 after a
period in the wilderness, is an inspiration to any businessperson whose career has taken a turn for
the worse. The way in which Mr Jobs revived the failing company he had co-founded and turned it
into the world’s biggest tech firm (bigger even than Bill Gates’s Microsoft, the company that had
outsmarted Apple so dramatically in the 1980s), sounds like something from a Hollywood movie.
But what was perhaps most astonishing about Mr Jobs was the absolute loyalty he managed
to inspire in customers. Many Apple users feel themselves to be part of a community, with Mr
Jobs as its leader. And there was indeed a personal link. Apple’s products were designed to accord
with the boss’s tastes and to meet his extremely high standards. Every iPhone or MacBook has his
fingerprints all over it. His great achievement was to combine an emotional spark with computer
technology, and make the resulting product feel personal. And that is what put Mr Jobs on the
right side of history, as technological innovation (创新)has moved into consumer electronics over
the past decade.
As our special report in this issue (printed before Mr Jobs’s death) explains, innovation used
to spill over from military and corporate laboratories to the consumer market, but lately this
process has gone into reverse. Many people’s homes now have more powerful, and more flexible,
devices than their offices do; consumer gadgets and online services are smarter and easier to use
than most companies’ systems. Familiar consumer products are being adopted by businesses,
government and the armed forces. Companies are employing in-house versions of Facebook and