Two Days After Ten Years Later

Two days ago I happened to get pointed to a commemorative video about Steve Jobs on Apple’s home page. A day afterwards I was wondering whether I could organize my thoughts about it, but on going back to the page the video was already gone and I wound up too busy to write a post then anyway. Today I was still trying to get my thoughts together, but I did happen on another link to the video.

So far as “remembering where you were” goes, being at a meeting of a (now shut down for years) local Apple user group when someone announced Steve Jobs had died seems to make the moment stick harder. I also remember certain “strike the tent; the show’s over” warnings before and after that moment. For all that Apple hasn’t gone away in the ten years since, it’s easy enough to think “don’t get too attached to tech companies, even one that makes a show of not making its money from selling ads.” At the same time, today the omnipresent “any day now...” threat, warning, and anticipation seems more “the company’s software will finish rotting out from within.” When it comes to “plan out alternatives in advance, just in case,” I did notice not that long ago a just-starting-out Linux variant striving to have a “universal menu bar at the top of the screen,” if one introduced with a certain amount of sanctimoniousness. It almost tempts me to just contemplate the video again; for all that the later footage of Jobs involved one product introduction after another, glimpses of the “G4 iMac” and “G4 PowerBooks” included among them brought a thought or two of “the past’s not altogether selected.”