Steve Jobs, Old Friend
It’s late. I’m in bed with the lights off and the MacBook glowing, the neighbors finally quiet after they’d spent an hour screaming and breaking things in the stairwell. Dark everywhere except the screen. iPhone beside me. The shelf across the room has all the Apple books, the Jobs books, the whole mythology. In a desk drawer there’s an old blue iPod nano I haven’t touched in years.
The tweets started rolling in. Steve Jobs was dead. I felt it hit like something physical—cold and raw and stupid-emotional all at once. Not now. Not him. Not Steve.
Over the last few years he’d become a joke to a lot of people. Some cult leader in turtlenecks hawking thousand-dollar phones to startup bros, suing everyone, dying thin on camera for the internet to gawk at. It made me furious, actually. Sad. Because he mattered to me. He really did.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, making this whole pitch—we needed a Mac, not just for us but for everyone, the whole world needed to get out of those gray plastic boxes Bill Gates had convinced everyone was normal. No Windows zombies here. We had taste. We had souls.
I disappeared into books about him. How’d he do it, this college dropout with acid trips and factory work and a spell in India, how’d he come back and make something nobody else could even imagine? He had a vision and the absolute refusal to accept that it couldn’t happen. That combination—vision and stubbornness—pulled at something in me.
Of course he was terrible in a lot of ways. Brutal with people. He denied his daughter for years. He cheated partners. I don’t want to whitewash that or pretend it didn’t matter. But there’s something in how he pushed through failure anyway, how he refused to live small, that feels important. For anyone trying to build something real.
The Stanford speech gets quoted all the time, probably too much, but there’s something true in it. He talked about death, about how knowing it was coming made everything else fall away—everyone else’s expectations, your own pride, the fear of getting it wrong. And what was left was just what actually mattered. That hit different after he died than it did when I heard it the first time.
I kept an internal conversation with him for years. Walking into something uncertain, I’d think: what would Steve do? Not to copy him, but to tap into that clarity, that refusal to settle. It worked often enough that it became a kind of secret life philosophy.
The battery’s almost gone. Outside on Twitter, the same photographs, the same quotes, the same goodbye. Goodnight, old friend. A dreamer, a nerd, someone the world won’t forget. Steve Jobs. God is dead.