#202 - Steve Jobs and the end of an era

My first PC was an Apple II. I was (still am!) a geeky engineer that was fascinated that I could have a computer in my house. I already could program (Fortran, Cobal and Basic) so getting a computer that I could train to do just about anything was amazing. Buying it in 1981 also meant I was at the very beginning of the PC revolution. My Apple II cost about $1200 and I bought it through the mail (none were being sold in Baton Rouge then). It came with a floppy disk drive and 64K of programmable memory. Wow!

I subscribed to 3 Apple magazines that had lots of programs I could type in, learn from and then modify to my needs. I also learned about the two Steves - Jobs and Wozniak. Woz the ultimate techno nerd and Jobs the great promoter. Woz would talk about the future stuff we could do to improve our Apples and Jobs would talk about where the world was heading due to a great technology revolution.

As good and successful as the Apple II was (they made it for over a decade!) The next two Apple PCs - The Apple III and Lisa were economic disasters. Even their successor the venerable Macintosh took literally years to take off. And somewhere in that chain of events, Apple let Steve Jobs go. As we all know he came back to start the "i" revolution. ipod, ipad, iphone...

Steve was always about design before function and design integrated into function. The PCs IBM made were boring, square and very functional. Apple PCs just looked better. So much better that there were Apples in museums of art! The importance of design over function lead the incredible success of all Apple products. They are innovative and usually first in class products. They are also pretty expensive. There is no "cheap" Apple product. Thus their tremendous margins and profitability. All thanks to Steve Jobs vision.

I'll miss the Apple product introductions that Steve was famous for. The demonstrations of products that catch your imagination and set you free from limitations the rest of the technology world impose. Vaya con dios Steve. You will be missed here.