Apple: The singular legacy of Steve Jobs

It’s time to say farewell to the Thomas Edison of our age, said Ken Auletta in The New Yorker. After battling cancer for almost a decade, Steve Jobs announced last week that he was stepping down as Apple’s CEO. He leaves behind a record unrivaled by almost any other 20th-century inventor. The scope of technologies that sprang from Jobs’s Cupertino, Calif., laboratories—he brought the first mouse into our homes, as well as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—“is awesome, as was that from Edison’s Menlo Park, N.J.” And like Edison, Jobs crafted his devices without input from endless focus groups and market research. He understood that consumers didn’t know what they wanted, “because they had no frame of reference for an iPhone that delivered a small miracle as it fit into the palm of a hand.” Jobs also balked at other accepted Silicon Valley practices. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other tech leaders scoffed when Jobs announced that Apple would produce both hardware and software, and laughed again when he said his company would open its own stores. Today those other firms are desperately trying to catch up with Apple, now the world’s second most valuable company, behind oil giant ExxonMobil.

So what’s the secret of Jobs’s success? asked Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Although he’s a great innovator, Jobs’s true genius lies in the mainstreaming of existing ideas. “Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player. Audio Highway did.” But the iPod now dominates the market, with over 300 million units sold to date. Apple also didn’t develop the first smartphone, “but the iPhone redefined what a phone should be.” Jobs understands that being first is overrated; what counts is being the best. Apple has stayed ahead of the competition thanks to its boss’s insistence on simple, intuitive design, said Nicole McInnes in the Sydney Telegraph. From the company’s first desktop computer to its latest iPad—which, like the iPhone, has only one button—every curve and user interface has been crafted to make this technology seem as natural as possible. “Ever wondered why a 1-year-old can use an iPhone? You don’t need a manual, it’s just an extension of your brain.”

Jobs’s influence stretches far beyond the tech sector, said David Carr in The New York Times. “By placing sexy, irresistible devices in the hands of the public,” he’s also shaken up the media landscape. The debut of the iPod and iTunes in 2001, for instance, gave music fans a “legitimate, easy-to-use alternative” to the pirate sites that were threatening to sink the music industry. In the process, Apple brought an end to the album format by allowing people to buy individual songs, and shattered record labels’ control of the industry. Now the iPad is having a similarly revolutionary impact on publishing. While newspapers and magazines have struggled to create an online “mechanism that separates consumers from their cash,” Apple has done just that with its easy-to-use App Store, where people can buy content “with the push of a button.”

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But “will Apple still be Apple” without Jobs at the helm? asked David Pogue, also in the Times. His replacement, former Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, gets “rave reviews as an executive and numbers guy.” But is he a Jobs-style micromanaging visionary who can run a $350 billion giant with “the nimbleness of a start-up company”? Would he have had the charisma to convince record labels to sell their music for $1 a song? Or the “crazy confidence to kill off technologies he sees as dying,” as Jobs did to the floppy-disk drive and the dial-up modem? I doubt it, and that’s why we’ll likely never see “another 15 years of blockbuster, culture-changing hits like the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad—from Apple or anyone else.” Jobs’s resignation comes at a dangerous time for the company, said Katherine Rushton in the London Telegraph. Google’s recent purchase of cell phone maker Motorola Mobility signals its intention to take on Apple at the hardware game. “Meanwhile, early Apple loyalists, many of whom once loved its underdog status, have started to rebel against its dictatorial approach.” Some are switching to Google’s open-source Android operating system, which is quickly building up an evangelical, Apple-like following.

Don’t worry about Apple’s post-Jobs future, said Felix Salmon in Reuters.com. It’s true that he was one of those rare CEOs “who really did make an enormous difference” to the company. “But even so, he’s just one guy,” and his DNA is now baked into the company. Cook might not be a product guru, but Apple’s head designer, Jonathan Ive, will be on hand to “slice away extraneous features on hardware, say no to the demands of the marketplace,” and give us gizmos we never knew we wanted. And anyway, Jobs—who remains company chairman—knows that he will be judged on the smoothness of this leadership handover. “I’m quietly confident that he’s done it perfectly.”