There is not a whole lot I can add to today’s blogosphere that hasn’t already been said. We will miss you Steve, and the world is richer from your contributions.
Thank you for being different. Thanks you for being easier to use. More elegant. More intuitive. Thank you for not allowing a poor product to see the light of day (ok, Newton was an idea ahead of the technology at the time), and for redoing it over and over again until it was right.
My own livelihood as a graphic designer is completely reliant on the hardware that you pioneered, and you revolutionized the design and publishing industry. You revolutionized home computing. You revolutionized the music industry. You revolutionized the cell phone industry. You revolutionized computer animation.
Since a very young age I’ve always had access or ownership of ever-more-capable Apple computers, from the early Apple II and on. It’s been a fun ride watching the technology develop and progress– to think that 20 years ago my Apple Centris 610 bosted a (seemingly huge) hard drive of 210 MB–miniscule by today’s standards–to this week’s debut of the SIRI Personal Assistant on the latest iteration of the iPhone, and iCloud launching in weeks. I will miss your keynote deliveries, and that last line that we always waited for, there’s just “one more thing…”
There is little in our world today that hasn’t been influenced in some small degree by the contributions of Apple–whether it be the products themselves or the people-centric industrial design an user-interfaces they inspired. You made the complex simple, and beautiful.
So again, Steve, thank you for going that extra mile for the rest of us. The world will miss you, but never forget you.
Killer Design 