One Year

Steve Jobs died on October 5th, 2011. A year on, the industry is still doing that thing where everyone speaks about him in the present tense, as though his opinions on current products are somehow derivable from his past ones. Maybe they are. He had a remarkable capacity for conviction—for deciding that something should exist and then making it exist through sheer refusal to accept that it couldn’t. Whether that was specific genius or expensive stubbornness dressed up as mythology is a question I still don’t have a clean answer to. Probably both, in proportions that shifted by the decade.