One more on Jobs, from Stephen Fry

[A-Polly]

I didn't see this on the forum already, but often miss things and apologize if it has been posted already. Stephen Fry is a better writer than many of the journalists whose tributes we have been reading. A favorite sentence:
The contrast between those awful prophets and Apple’s awesome profits was (and is) something to behold.

Edit for the oops: forgot the link!
http://www.stephenfry.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs/

[Kate]

Thanks so much for sharing this. Frys is such a fine writer.

Kate

[lost in space]

That was the best piece I've read about Jobs since his death. I like that he mentioned the Lisa, usually overlooked.

[Black]

Interesting bit about www being written on a Next box. Effectively, Steve Jobs invented . . . um, OK, maybe I shouldn't.

[tenders]

I used one of the first NeXT boxes in college for an assembly language course.

It was an amazing device in many ways but the magneto drive was tragically dog-slow, even for 1989. To call it "dog-slow" is an insult to even the slowest dog, to be honest. And while the display architecture and the laser printer (yes, there were NeXT laser printers) were way ahead of their time, the absurd cost, unwieldiness, and general user experience of the machine were fatal flaws.

We were calling them LaST machines by the end of the semester.

[sekker]

"Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car, Rockefeller didn’t discover how to crack crude oil into petrol, Disney didn’t invent animation, the Macdonald brothers didn’t invent the hamburger, Martin Luther King didn’t invent oratory, neither Jane Austen, Tolstoy nor Flaubert invented the novel and D. W. Griffith, the Warner Brothers, Irving Thalberg and Steven Spielberg didn’t invent film-making. Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers and he didn’t invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish."

[Seacrest]

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvelous and instant indicator of a fool.

[deckeda]

Damn, I'm only half-way through reading this and already I can tell it's the best synopsis of what's made Apple, and yes Jobs, different.

As Fry says, style is substance and if you don't get that you're a clod only looking at what something says it will do, not whether or not it can do it well enough to matter.

[RAMd®d]

I just read[ ] The Macalope Weekly as saw a quote from Fry and came here to post it.

A day late, etc (although not quite).

One of my favorite phrases came from a dealchat/macresource souce, Bob maybe? I don't recall, but it's "...a graceful blend of style and substance". Whether that was the exact phrase or whether Bob's the author or your uncle, that's how I've long viewed Apple products touched by Jobs and his team.

Fry's quote:


Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.


And I love that Fry referenced "experts".

It always cracked me up when buffoons on parade jumped on the "iMac/iPod/iPhone/iPad/whatever Apple makes is evolutionary, not revolutionary" band wagon, because this bit here or that bit there "has already been done years ago by somebody else" blah, blah, blah. Nobody bothered to put the bits together or bothered doing so in a way that people realized worked for them.

One disturbing point of the Macalope's article is that some people used Job's death as an opportunity for link bait hate. Fortunately I've avoided running it to that, but I've ignored sources of "experts" who want to make fun of those who feel loss and sadness.

Fry is a great writer. It's not just the accent.

[rankandfile]

Thanks for the link.

This is a fine piece of writing.